It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 21

Episode Date: February 12, 2022

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this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,

there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and occasionally even about how to put some other things back together. and occasionally even about how to put some other things back together. Today we're going to be talking about something that is increasingly a part of what we like to call the crumbles around here, which is the healthcare system in this country and the hospital system in this country as it kind of gets crunched by COVID. And we're going to particularly talk about a really critical aspect of our entire medical infrastructure that a lot of people don't know about, traveling nurses. And with me today is our guest, Anne. Anne, you are a traveling nurse from New was a regular staff nurse until COVID hit.

And, you know, at that time, we expected it to crunch everywhere. But my home hospital, like many places that worked on the coast, ended up being really empty when everybody locked down and stopped getting into car accidents and going to parties and all of the other things that bring people into the ER and ICUs. So at that time, I quit my full-time job and went to New York as a travel nurse. And then I've been bouncing around hotspots since then. So New York, Texas, Ohio, rural New Mexico. I just finished my third contract in California. I've been up to Oregon. So I've seen the healthcare system working and not working in a lot of different places. And also like how much disparity there is in different communities related to COVID and the healthcare that we can provide. Yeah. And I am kind of, before we move on to some of the specific things going on with travel nurses, what is your sense of like, how often are you in a place and

feel like, well, this, the hospital system here, this particular hospital, they're, they're like right on the edge of a breaking point. Uh, most of the time. Okay. That's good to know. Wear your seatbelts folks. Yeah. I mean, particularly since everyone was able to get vaccinated, right? Like, to me, I really feel like that that that point of like the tipping point of like the quote unquote crumbles, kind of like after everybody was able to get their second vaccination. and things were reopening and it was kind of like, wow, things could go back to normal. And then like, I don't believe that's going to happen. And since then, I've seen so much more despair in my coworkers. And I've heard about so many more healthcare suicides, staff nurses, travel nurses, RTs, other ancillary people.

And, you know, the kind of running joke in a lot of workplaces is like, well, I hope I test positive for COVID because that would be better than coming into work another day. Yeah. Or I hope I get hit by a car so I don't have to come in. Your job, I think, is what a lot of people would, is the people who, you know, are reasonable human beings and see what you're doing is incredibly necessary, find the, would find the work to be something of a nightmare. I mean, it sounds like horrific to have to deal with this. I mean, it's not an easy job in the best of times being a nurse, but like with COVID and stuff, it's just, there's so much else on y'all's plates. And one of the things that has

happened over the course of the last year, well, almost two years now, is that from January 2020, the advertised pay rates for travel nurses around the country have gone up by about 67%, which in staffing firms have increased their billing of hospitals by like 28 to 32%. So like this huge raise in what, um, tribal nurses are demanding and what is getting paid out. And I think a reasonable person would go, well, yeah, of course. Um, and yeah, I think anybody would go, any reasonable person would go, well, yeah, of course you guys deserve much more money than that for what you're dealing

with right now. Um, I have no problem with this, but people who do have problems with this, the American Hospital Association, among other folks, generally the folks who are seeing this primarily as a, well, now we're spending more money issue, as opposed to a, hey, maybe we don't have enough nurses. Right. So I guess I have maybe a couple of comments on that. So one of the things about travel nurses, so if, if you're not in the travel field and you say, I want to change hospitals, even if you're an experienced nurse, they will take between a month and six months to go through their hiring process. And then they will give you a week, two weeks, maybe four weeks of orientation.

So that's a long process to hire a nurse normally. Yeah. For me as a travel nurse, I will talk to a recruiter. I will say yes. I will be on the road somewhere between four hours to 24 hours later. I will get to the hospital. I will do a bunch of paperwork that is for compliance and makes no difference at all. I will get between two and six hours of orientation, which is basically here's the bathroom, here's the storeroom. This is what we're going to audit in the charts. And then I'm expected to take care of complex, actively dying patients. So, so, you know, people complain about how much we're getting paid, but if you only have two hours of like, where's the bathroom?

And like, this is how you get, and most of the time when you're spending with IT being like, hey, I need computer access, buddy. And then there you are and you're in the thick of it with no backup, you know, so you already have to be an expert in your field and you have to be able to walk into an unfamiliar chaotic situation and hit the ground running immediately. So yes, making 120 bucks an hour is a lot of money but i don't know that that's so super unreasonable for two hours of like yeah exit now take care of people who are actively dying and don't screw it up it's the way we're told the system is supposed to work right like this is how capitalism is supposed to function

the demand for something goes up and the demand for nursing is way the hell up. So the price goes up. If you believe in capitalism, like one assumes these people who are responsible for paying you and are currently lobbying. So what's happening? I should go back because we didn't note this. and a number of other folks are lobbying Congress right now to put a cap on the amount of money that traveling nurses can receive. And a number of Congress people have said that they're going to be looking into the issue. Several states, Oregon, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Kentucky have introduced legislation that's attempting to cap nurse pay rates. So there's like this huge backlash attempting to lock down the amount of money y'all can continue to get paid because of all of the

things this country, I guess, has money for the people dealing with the, I don't know what, I don't know how many millions of additional sick and dying people are kind of beyond what these folks are willing to shell out for. Have I gotten the size of that? And I mean, to clarify, so in a FEMA contract, so what a lot of the contracts I take are, so the nurse is making between $100 and $125 an hour. And maybe you also have a tax restipend or you don't kind of depending on how you are in that. And then, but the bill rate to the hospital is usually like two 20 to 40. So the legislation is against the agencies because the agencies are making between 40 to 60%. Of course the agency is then going to say, Hey, well, we aren't going to pay you as much because we still want the same cut. Yeah. My understanding. So the trickle down effect is likely going to be travel nurse wages.

But my understanding is it's asking the FTC to take enforcement against the travel nurse agencies because the agencies, they're the ones that say they have the person on the phone that says, hey, you have these credentials. We want to send you to this hospital. Yes or no. We've got this hotel arranged or we don't or, you know, those types of and to send you to this hospital. Yes or no. We've got this hotel arranged or we don't or, you know, those types of and we're going to do this type of onboarding. So they have their own kind of infrastructure and they take, you know, half,

60 percent of the cut. And so some of those people are making a lot of money, too. Yeah. And it seems like it's kind of the situation where the way this is being framed, they're trying to crack down on these people who are kind of profiteering or could be argued to be profiteering off the situation um rather than trying to cap the amount that that the nurses can make so to speak um or at least not by as much uh but the overall effect will be that because of the way these companies work y'all will still wind up making less money. Yeah. How, within the traveling nurse community, what is kind of, where are people right now with this? Like what is, what is kind of the mood? So I think there's a couple of things to note. So in the FEMA contracts, they're usually 60 to 72

hour contracts. So you're working back to back to back to back. So I'll do 80 hour weeks sometimes. And most people are not white women like me. This is mostly first and second generation immigrants and generally people of color. So these are not people that are saving for Lamborghinis. These are people that are paying off their student loans because a lot of them went to private nursing schools because that was kind of what was accessible to them because of all of the disparity in education and opportunities. These are people that are trying to pay off their mortgages. These are people who are paying off their parents' houses. So this kind of idea that nurses are greedy is, I think, really unfair because most of us are just trying to make a know make a life that works and also you can't

do 80-hour contracts 52 weeks out of the year no it i mean doing it for any extended period of time i've worked those kind of hours in in a generally less stressful uh working environment um and it like it breaks you down um over time like you you can't do that at any time in your life for one thing like um and you can't do that forever and it sounds like this is kind of a lot of people are taking it as like this is an opportunity i can get my parents out of debt i can i can get a house um i can save for my kids. I can pay off my own college. Like it's a chance for a lot of these people by putting in an unbelievable amount of effort to get ahead. And I can't even imagine the frustration at seeing so many people be like, well, no, not so fast. And I mean, one of the things that people are bringing up is right, like, in the same way that, you know, we struggle to want to pass minimum wage laws for the undocumented immigrants that pick our food and, you right? Like you're targeting a section of the population that are not the people that have doubled, tripled their wealth in the pandemic, right? Like these are not all of the people that got the small business loans

that didn't need them and, you know, and have, are just putting all of that money into stock, right? These are not, these are people that just want a middle-class american dream and we're willing to work really really hard for it and i mean there these are people who are asking can i have the thing we're all promised if i spend 80 hours a week watching people in a lot of cases choke out their last fucking breaths is that okay and a lot of people are saying oh of course not right and you know so we're taking care of dying people while we're getting yelled at at the phone of like is cursing allowed on the show or not absolutely yes of course yeah i mean i had a family member saying you're fucking imprisoning her on a ventilator i'm gonna come for you where do you

fucking live you know we have to get security involved um you know we get death threats i've had people like threatened to find where i live and rape me jesus fucking christ and so i mean yeah yeah 67 isn't enough of a race taking care of your dying loved one who also probably would say those same things to me because i would say hey please be vaccinated and they would say those same things to me because I would say, hey, please be vaccinated. And they would say, fuck you. But I'm still going to do everything I can to take care of them. And I'm going to endure this abuse. And like, yeah, if I'm going to leave my home and the safety of a hospital that works and go into these total clusterfucks of hospitals where the educator has left, the manager has left, the director has left.

So there's no leadership. It's 80% travelers, some of which are great, some of which are also hot messes and trying to take care of these people. Then like, yes, I want to be paid accordingly for it. Now, would I trade that for a social safety net of health insurance? Because I have to get private health insurance, which is shady. I don't get any disability insurance. I have to get private health insurance, which is shady. I don't get any disability insurance. I have no sick leave. Right. Because you're a pinch hitter. You're not like salaried anywhere. Yeah. But would I trade this high salary for a social safety net? Personally, I would. Yes. But I mean, nobody's going to say like, yes, you will be able to retire with dignity if you play by all of these rules.

They don't believe that. I want to make the money. Yeah. I mean, we're all always in this kind of like, yes, sock away as much as you can while it's coming situation. And geez, especially if you're doing something you're going to need to recover from later. Right. Like this is, I've done overseas work. I understand kind of the nature of like trauma. And while you're doing the job at the rate you're doing it, you're also like pushing off a day of reckoning mentally. And by God, having a cushion of savings helps with that. Like in the middle of it, you're in it. And then, you know, sometimes it's weeks, sometimes it's months. I hiked the Colorado Trail for mental health and half of those nights I had ICU nightmares.

So I was in these beautiful middle of nowhere places where everything was quiet. I would wake up with all of the beeps and people dying in my head night after night after night, you know? Yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm angry that they don't want to compensate me for that because I mean, they're definitely not paying for my therapist. They definitely like aren't giving me access to disability if I need it. Right. Like, yeah, because obviously, again, you're you're a contractor effectively. There's not like a union for traveling nurses, is there? Or am I wrong about that? No. So, I mean, the only thing you have is your negotiating power. about that no so i mean the only thing you have is your negotiating power um so i have eight years of experience between emergency and icu um and a lot of very um big and highly regarded hospitals

so i'm a hot commodity to them so i can kind of pick and choose um who i want to work with compared to someone that has less desirable specialties not that those specialties don't also work as hard, but they're just harder. They're easier to staff. So therefore they're not. Yeah. It's a market thing. Sure. Right.

It's a market thing. I definitely don't believe that my specialties are more like inherently valuable just in terms of the market. Um, so, you know, so I get, I can, I have the luxury of turning down contracts that aren't what I want, but I mean, I have no idea what I'm walking into. So on Monday, I'll walk into somewhere. They said, you'll do some paperwork, you'll get your orientation, you'll have, it'll all be, it'll be a busy day and then you'll be on your own. And I have no idea. Sometimes you're oriented in one unit and you never see that unit again.

So, and I, you know, you have no idea. Sometimes you're oriented in one unit and you never see that unit again. So, and I, you know, you have no idea what you're walking into. And how long are these contracts generally for? So before COVID, the standard nursing contract was 13 weeks. Okay. Since COVID, a lot of them are shorter and I've only done short contracts because if it's a decent place, then I can renew and stay longer usually. And if it's a bad place, then I'm pretty happy to get out early. So I do between four and eight week contracts.

And I usually do 60 plus hours a week. Is there any kind of like organization that you've seen come together a little more between people who are doing this, this gig, since you don't have kind of representation, is that something that started to take form in the last two years since COVID? I mean, there's definitely a lot of talk about it. I think like those of us that started traveling since the pandemic, you know, I would say that I've only done crisis contracts. Like I've never done a normal 13 week, 36 hour a week, not crisis assignment. Like I've only gone into the shit show hotspots. Um, and so therefore like my needs and desires are different than somebody who likes that previous lifestyle. So in some ways it's a little bit hard for us to kind of agree

on common goals because we have a lot of different, you know, we're a very diverse group of nurses. Yeah. Definitely the Million Nurse March is kind of a step towards that. Tell me about that. What is this? Because I just learned about this pretty recently. Yeah. So I dropped off the grid for the last five days, which was fantastic for me, but it means I'm also just starting to figure it out. So the kind of general idea is that, you know, we have, I think I'm

going to, hopefully I don't get it wrong. I have 4 million, some nurses in the country, a huge number of nurses in the country and a huge number of dropping out. Yeah. You know, hundreds of thousands quit last year. They, I think one estimate is 500,000 may quit this year. And we were, just so people know, tens of thousands of nurses understaffed before COVID nationwide. Yes. Right. Right. And, you know, I think one of the things to understand too, is that like, if you work, I don't know, what's a, what's a normal type of job that people work? I don't know. If you work at the DMV, a book man. Oh, right. Right. If you work at the DMV and the DMV is slow, you will still stay there eight hours and you'll still get paid for your eight hours.

If you are a normal nurse and you work 36 hours and the ER is running slow, they could say, we're just canceling you for the rest of the day. Go home. We won't pay you for those last six hours. And so like, we've always had pretty like flexible, uh, like we've never had a minute. Most of the places I've worked have never had guaranteed hours. And so one of the reasons to go to travel contracts too, is also so you can at least have guaranteed hours. So there's a lot of kind of protections that nurses have never really had like guaranteed hours, um, like, uh, staff ratios. So some states, California and Oregon are two of them. If you go into the ICU, which is the highest level of care, so people are actively dying, actively unstable, things can go bad within seconds. Usually it's a one nurse will have two patients, which is pretty much all you

can handle because there are multiple drips, multiple types of life support, keeping them alive. So ventilators being the one that we see the most. And it's really your responsibility to know every inch of that person's body and everything going on with them. And you really direct a lot of their care. So two to one kind of makes a lot of sense. Since the pandemic and not having enough nurses, sometimes that's led to three to one or even in bad situations, four to one. So one of the statistics that, um, one of the, um, kind of nurse influencers and comedians nurse Blake talks about, um, is that for every additional patient that a nurse takes on. And I believe he's talking about med-surg, not ICU, that that patient's mortality increases by 7%. So, yeah. So asking a nurse to do more with less is not just like, hey, just suck it up, be busier. This is actively contributing to people's disability and early deaths. So one of the things that the Million Nurse March wants to talk about is

mandated staffing ratios. So ICU would be two to one, med-surg is usually four to one, I think ER they're asking for three to one. So these have been studied by the American Nurses Association and other sort of nursing organizations. And not only do they make your job as a nurse so much better, because we go into nursing because we want to fix things and take care of people. We want good outcomes, right? Like you don't go into nursing to just run around with your head cut off and watch everyone die, right? Like that's terrible.

You go into nursing because you want the people to get better under your care and you want to be able to give them that. And so when you're asked to take care of more patients than you're able to, you're not able to do that. And it just crushes you. So not only is it better for nurse satisfaction, it also saves patients lives and also prevents things that cause lasting disability, like ventilator associated pneumonia or bed sores or delirium or things like that. So mandating patient ratios is one of the really big things that the Million Nurse March is for. There's a lot of talk about pay and living wages. Like every section, housing prices and inflation have gone through the roof.

Sure, because you've got to be renting renting a spot whenever you're like the hospital ain't putting you up. Right. Well, and for staff nurses too, right? Like if you're, you know,

maybe, maybe they gave you a 2% raise, but Hey, rent increased 30%. Sure. Um, I used to be on the interview board at my old hospital and we would just tell people like,

if you're moving to Denver as a single person, we lose most of our nurses because they haven't looked at housing. So like they'll accept a job and then they'll look for a place to live and be like, Oh, I can't afford to live here. So, Hey, like, I mean, we can't ask if you're single moving here, but like, you probably can't afford to live here with what we're going to pay you. I mean, cool. I, I, uh, it's just uh it's so eternally frustrating that like the one thing that everybody when you sit them down agrees is is incontrovertibly necessary

medical care um we can agree on a lot of things but not how to make sure the people doing it uh have a good quality of life and good income. Like we have all these fun rules that make it possible to charge X number of thousand dollars for a dose of insulin. But we don't just have a law that's like, hey, if you're working full time as a nurse, maybe you shouldn't have to be housing insecure. I don't know. How do you make that into a law? But it seems like there should be some option for a country that can make some of the things we make.

Yeah. I mean, tying wages to housing prices seems like, I don't know, for me not being an economist and not being an administrator, like that sounds super easy to me. Like housing goes up 15%, everybody gets a 15% raise. I'm like sure i'm sure it's more complicated than that but it seems super simple to yeah send a guy around with a stick to threaten landlords when they raise rent like there's we can debate the answers to this sure what do you think are you i mean not not that like you have any sort of comprehensive knowledge of all of the people doing this but like do you think there's a possibility of like a wildcat strike which is again for people who maybe are is when there's a strike of workers who are not unionized um i mean to some extent with everybody quitting

to do travel nursing it's not so different i mean some units have lost 80 of their staff good lord yeah right some like when a unit says oh well we lost 50 of my staff i'm kind of like well you did better than most you know um so in some ways it's already happening and in in that same way i am seeing hospitals give better extent incentives to their this nurses that have stayed um um, either retention bonuses or, um, increasing bonuses for pick for core staff, picking up extra shifts, um, or kind of other perks, like increasing education benefits or things like that. So I think hospitals are responding to like, Hey, we don't want to lose these people to traveling. Like, can we tip the balance a little bit and I think you know overall hospital leadership

is moving slower than they need to um but I mean at least they're moving a little bit so I mean in that way I can see a wildcat strike um just coming from the kind of labor forces at play um and I could and I mean there were one of the hospitals in the South, I think it was Alabama, all of their staff, their staff coordinated. Um, so that the ship that was on agreed to stay late because you can't, because abandoning patients, um, can put your license at risk. Right. So if we all walked off in the middle of a shift and said, fuck you to the hospital administrators and patients died, then like our license is at risk. So we also have to kind of balance that a little bit. Yeah.

But there was a hospital, they organized for the day shift basically to stay as late as they needed and night shift all stood outside the hospital and wouldn't refuse to clock it in. So sometimes these things are happening in small levels. Also. Interesting. Really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's the more of that. Yeah. Yeah. are happening in small levels um also um really interesting yeah yeah it is like yeah um i mean and that is like such a tough thing to balance just the idea that like well you are

health care workers like withholding your labor is a thing that's going to be necessary from time to time there's also consequences for it that are not present if you're making, I don't know, tires, you know? Right. Yeah. And as much as teachers and nurses are the same, like, I don't think our country cares about educating children as much as it cares about their parents dying, you know? Yes. For better or worse. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's another subject. Is there anything else you wanted to get into today before we close out for the episode?

I mean, if it's okay with you and you can cut it if it's not, you know, I try and tweet about kind of what's happening on the ground. Yeah, absolutely. And the things that I'm seeing. And I'm mostly finished with a book about the first year on the front line and seven different hospitals and kind of the disparities between, you know, critical access in New Mexico versus trauma hospitals in, you know, the Bay Area and kind of what that first year looked like. If you want, you can follow me on Twitter. It's Anne, A-N-N-E, like Anne of Green Gables, Anne RN 2020, which is when I started travel nursing. You know, and so that I kind of talk a little bit about like what I'm seeing and what's going on. I was recently in an ER where, you know, people often had to stay outside under the heat lamps for 30 hours waiting for a hospital bed just because everything was packed.

under the heat lamps for 30 hours waiting for a hospital bed just because everything was packed so they couldn't even come inside the hospital and they were you know waiting um to get their appendix out and things like that yeah again and so wear your seat belts and a helmet you know be real be real careful right now guys right um and i mean i think the other thing is the blood shortage um so most hospitals are revising their guidelines of who will get a blood transfusion so you now have to be much more critical before they will give you a blood transfusion so um there's a lot of politics around blood donation but if you feel like you can donate blood um it's really desperately needed yeah and people are gonna wear your seatbelts because people are really going to legitimately die because we run out of blood.

Yeah. Boy, howdy. Please wear your seatbelts, folks. Just hunker down for a little while. No new risky experiments in life for just a minute. Not the time to take up skydiving. Yeah, yeah. Maybe avoid that.

Maybe don't go skiing if you haven't gone skiing before. I just did that and broke my wrist because I'm exactly as dumb as the people I'm trying to warn. And then I guess just check in with the mental health of your healthcare workers. Because, I mean, so many people have, you know, I think a lot of us are dealing with at least passive sort of like, fuck, maybe I should just drive off the road instead of going into work today, sort of thoughts, you know? And for a lot of us, that's just that fleeting thought. And then we get our shit together.

But for some people it's going to be more than that. And, you know, nursing is one of those things where people have defined themselves by their career and they need people in their lives saying like if you are never a nurse again you are still valued you are still loved just being alive is enough and this is how you know we can help take care of you if you need to quit for three months you know um and supporting people with their intrinsic value rather than like you are only productive and valuable because you are there saving lives. Cause I think a lot of us really get stuck in that.

And a lot of us are drawn into nursing because we feel some lack of worthiness without it, you know? Well, and that's the hard thing to get other people to do because in part, this is a society where we just have such generally crummy attitudes towards mental health. But like,

we're great at, at saying things like, Oh, you know, there's a pandemic. Our healthcare workers are heroes. You're all heroes because of the work that you're doing. The work makes you a hero as opposed to saying,

Hey, thank you for doing that. I know things are still fucked up right now, but if you decide you got to like take a break or whatever, you know, you're, you're, you're,

you're, that doesn't mean you like what you did was still wonderful, and you're still great and valuable. And maybe the best thing is for you to take that break, and not drive yourself off of a cliff. Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's harder to get people to like, wave banners that say outside of their apartment complexes. Right. Maybe you'd be good if people were like banging on pots to like, let healthcare workers know that no matter what they do, they're valued members of the community that people love. But yeah.

All right. Well, and thank you so much for talking with us today. I hope you, you hold together and help the people in your life hold together, which is all any of us can really do other than wear a seatbelt. Yeah. And thank you for being a part of the conversation.

And thank you for, you know, listening to hard things. And, you know, that's one thing that I think we really appreciate is people who will actually listen with open hearts and, and we'll witness this with us so that we're not alone in it. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It could happen here, is the podcast that you're listening to right now. I'm Robert Evans. All right, that's my job done who what are we what are we doing what are we doing today hey what's up

hey andrew back at it again with another podcast um today we're doing something a little bit different from the previous episodes that i've done we're having a bit more of an open discussion about a certain book that has been passed around for about a decade now and has polarized members of the anarchist community, to put it that way. Today we'll be talking about the book, the infamous polemic Desert by Anonymous. For those who are, you know, not aware of this extremely controversial text, Desert is a nihilist anarchist text which was published in 2011 that is mainly directed at other anarchists

and seeks to address issues of climate collapse and revolution it became somewhat of a meme to tell folks to read Desert I'm not sure when that was but I just remember seeing it a lot I think in like 2020 yeah around 2019 2020 I'm not sure when that was, but I just remember seeing it a lot. I think in like 2020.

Yeah, around 2019, 2020, Reed Desert became a meme. Yeah, yeah. All over Twitter and Instagram and Reddit. But of course, being a thing that exists on the internet, people naturally became torn on the subject of it. And so there are a lot of perspectives and opinions and think pieces about Desert, some more or less accurate than others. But we are here to discuss the book, our personal experiences reading it,

things we think it gets right and wrong, and what we could potentially learn going forward. So I would say the floor is yours, whoever wants to go first. I mean, I'm a huge fan of the quote that the book takes its, or that it takes its name from, which comes from Tacitus, who was a dude writing in the Roman period. And the exact quote that it comes from is, and he's talking,

Tacitus is talking about the Roman Empire. Robbers of the world, now that the earth is insufficient for their all devastating hands, they probe even the sea. If their enemy is rich, they are greedy. If he is poor, they thirst for dominion. Neither east nor west has satisfied them. Huh. Good-ass quote. It is a solid yeah and obviously i think people living in the

shadows of every empire that's ever existed can identify with that quote um it's it's a powerful kind of central idea to hang your uh extended essay i don't really know what the best term to refer to it is. Yeah, it's a long essay. Yeah, it's a very long essay. As we talked about kind of coming into this, it's extremely 2010s. So pre-Arab Spring, pre all the big uprisings and revolts we had in 2019 and 2020. There's definitely some stuff that it gets very right and and i think kind of one of the ways in which it's had an impact on me is kind of i've i've thought about what happens to sort of culture as the result of this kind of hollywood engine that is heavily tied up with the united states military industrial complex um as a process of desertification of ideas

and the ability to conceive of new futures. That said, I haven't reread it in a very long time and haven't really felt called to in many ways because I do think, I don't know, I think there's an extent to which it's been kind of left behind. Yeah. Yeah. Some of the things that have happened since.

I think. Yeah. I will say that as someone who really came into my own as an artist in like 2020, early 2020, although i had identified with it before um when i had read the book um i think it was in late 2020 early late 2020 so when i read the book first time i read it and honestly um there was some good some bad, some very outdated stuff. And also some stuff that, I don't know, maybe the author felt it was groundbreaking at the time. But at this present stage, it just feels like common knowledge, sense you know i mean it was it was groundbreaking in a way for like climate

realism right like this was this was written before you know this is written before climate leviathan this was written before um the uninhabitable earth this was written before a lot of kind of the texts that view climate change as an absolute like this was written before a lot of kind of the texts that view climate change as an absolute like this was written one year before hyper objects which is really interesting actually because you know the whole premise of that book is that climate change is is done like it happened where like there's no turning back the clock and the desert was written even before that like it was it was one of the first things now of course it's it's much more niche but like it was it was one of the first things now of course it's much it's much more niche but like it was if i if i look if i look back in books that have like impacted me it was it's one of the

first books like that came out like timeline wise to take climate change is like yeah it's there's no saving it like there's no living in the 2000s there's no living in the 90s again it's like things are like the world's not going to end but things are going to get worse right like and that and that is kind of a big a big part of the book because right it's it's also it's also not pro collapse like it doesn't take collapse as an absolute it doesn't take it doesn't it doesn't subscribe to global collapse and that's one of the misconceptions i think people have about the book. Yeah. That they just assume it's like this collapse, doomerous,

like misanthropic kind of text, but. Which I, I did not read it as that. I first read it around the same time you did. And I read it as a part of a lot of books I was reading to prep for the show when we, when we were writing our first five episodes on like on climate change and,

and like the crumbles so i read it read it as a part of my kind of general research and yeah like at that point it was already kind of memefied to be like you know like an anarcho-nihilist like doomer manifesto and i read it and like that's not what it's saying at all it's actually saying like the opposite of that once i had read it i was like i was really taking it back at how how easily um popular perceptions of a piece of media could um i mean honestly corrupted beyond recognition yeah you know like if people a bunch of people are telling you know this that or the other about a certain text or whatever you know it's kind of shake it kind of shakes you up to like actually consume it for yourself and then realize how did y'all get that yeah how did you read that out of it it is really interesting because

i'm not even sure if they did read out of it or if that was the perception they had going into it so they read it through that lens and that lens basically, you know, changed the text in their head to fit that thing. Because, yeah, it is really interesting how how it is so associated with like doomerism. Yet if you like engage in good faith with the text, it's very much not a doomer manifesto in any way. Although there are aspects of it that I am that I think attitude wise that I am critical of. But I think Chris was going to say something. Yeah. So I was gonna say like,

I really, I've always not liked this book. Like I read it back in, I think 2017, 2018 when it was first sort of like coming back. Yeah. And I didn't like it then. And I reread it this morning and I like it even less now than I did then.

And I think, I think I, I actually, I actually, okay. So like, I think it's true that most of the text doesn't do the Doomer thing, even less now than i did then and and i think i think i i actually i actually okay so like i i think it's true that most of the text doesn't do the doomer thing but i think i understand where

people got it from because you know you have quotes in this like uh here's one yet i can already hear the accusations from my own camp accusations of deserting the cause of revolution deserting the struggle for another world such accusations are correct i would rejoin that such millenarian and progressive myths are at the core of the expansion of power and this is this is what i really like i i think from an ecological perspective it's sort of okay i strongly dislike desert as an anarchist text because i think that's just wrong i think i think i think there's there's there's there's an ingrained defeatism in it that is so strong that it warps the author's perception of the past. Like you get these things where he's talking about these kind of – he's talking about like what you call the classical anarchist movement from roughly like 1870 to really sort of ends with the defeat of the anarchists in Spain in like 1937.

really sort of ends with the defeat of the anarchists in Spain in like 1937. And, and he, you know, they say things like from Spain, pre 1936 to the Jewish anarchists in North America, the illegalist of France and the Italian anarcho syndicalist of Argentina, the inhabitants of anarchist counter societies were always by definition, active minorities.

The minorities may have gotten larger in an instructionary moments, but they remained at minorities always. And that's just wrong. It's factually wrong. Like these, these movements were not minorities like the like the entire like the the like the the largest union in france was the cg like in in the early 1900s was the the ugc of the cg that all all of the the french spanish portuguese country speaking countries have a hat they have one union that's called the UGC and one union that's called the CGT, and I can never remember which one's which. But, like, that was the largest union in France, and it was a syndicalist union, right?

Like, it was – and there's, you know, the same thing with Argentina, right? For a while, it was the largest union in Argentina. And I think, and this is sort of my problem with this, which is that, you know, this is a person who's basically, like they talk about like they were born in the 70s and they're writing this 2011 in just the midst of the collapse of sort of like the complete total destruction of the old anarchist movement, right? The anarchist movement that had been born out of sort of

like the Zapatistas and the anti-globalization movement. And they'd been beaten so badly that, you know, I mean, they were crushed, they were completely destroyed and they'd been beaten so badly. They, they,

they can't, they, they, they literally can't imagine winning and think that like, like revolution in general, like is, is essentially a secular, is a secular theology. They repeat this over and over and over again. It's like revolution is a theology. Revolution is a secular theology they repeat this over and over

and over again it's like revolution is a theology revolution is a myth this and it's like and this is this is something that's just a product of of defeat it's not a product of sort of taking seriously the conditions that are emerging around them and you know i was talking about this before the recording it's like right after this is written it's you get the movement of the squares and then you get Occupy and it's like basically like every major city in the world goes into revolt the revolts are anarchist inspired

and you know and then desert like this is why desert vanishes for like six or seven years because desert is a piece that's written like it's a piece that's that's only happens in a very specific part of a revolutionary cycle, which is when everything has been crushed, all resistance has been crushed, everyone's losing hope, and then everyone starts reading Desert again. And then the revolutions restart. And at that point, like once there's like, you know, 200,000 people in the streets again, like fighting the cops, it becomes less and less sort of like, like that part of its analysis becomes less and less relevant until, you know, inevitably everyone like there's a defeat and then everyone goes sort of like, and I think that's why it has the Doomer rep because it's the text that people read when you've been beaten in the streets. See, yeah, that's an interesting look at it.

Because I definitely agree with the revolution is a myth thing. Specifically within the context of the United States, which I believe that's what the book's trying to mostly focus on. They do bring up other parts of the world and stuff. But it's definitely written by an American citizen. That is – I mean, that could actually be wrong. It may not be written by an American, but in terms of reading it, it is kind of through a very Western lens of, like, revolutions not happening here. And I definitely sympathize and agree with that viewpoint and i mean if you're gonna point at me like it was 2011 then occupy happened i'm like

yeah but occupy didn't but that also felt like every every attempt has not succeeded in this country to get any kind of big meaningful change that we can push towards something that's like post-capitalist um so yeah i mean i i do think i think it's it's it's mostly targeting people specifically like communists um or marxist londonists who like are just waiting around for the revolution to happen and then don't do anything like that right that is no but that is the thing it's trying to point but but but but i think this is this is why it's a text that's like that's not good for the moment because our problem isn't that like like the the problem right now isn't that there's no like there's no uprising on the horizon like everyone's been completely beaten down no one's ever going to go into the

streets again our problem is that like there's just there's there's there's periodic uprisings everywhere and every single time everyone is caught off guard and every single time no one's able to actually sort of mobilize off of it. And, you know, like, like, like, no, no, no one's been able to, like, pivot it into something that's actually like transformative. But I think that that's a very different problem than the problem that Desert is because Desert has already abandoned the possibility that an uprising can win. That's I mean, it's I mean, I think I kind of have too. Yeah, and they specifically abandoned the idea of global revolution,

right? That is the thing they're specifically targeting. They're saying smaller local things actually can succeed in a lot of ways, but they're trying to tie this idea of global revolution as a pacifying idea, right? Just waiting around for this to happen and tying

that to this, at the time much more niche idea, now it's way more popular, but this idea of like global collapse and how people think if they can, people think believing in global collapse is smarter than believing in global revolution. They think it's more realistic. But the book's saying, no,

this idea of global collapse actually falls under all the same issues that global revolution has. I think I'd want to sort of comment here. With regard to the defeatist sort of reading in the text, I understand that reading. I mean, personally, I distinguish between defeatism and dumberism and i always think like my own personality and my own perspective kind of like inoculates me in a way from like adopting that kind of defeatist attitude towards um you know change but i don't think the book is entirely um you know dismissive of like revolution um it just i think the main thrust of it is that

it's critical of the idea of like one global revolution one global collapse what it really emphasizes is that you know climate change brings new possibilities for new anarchies plural to develop worldwide in response changing circumstances but at the same time you know in some areas things are going to get worse in some areas things are going to get better and it's not that really one broad brush could be applied to the entire earth you know but i i think i mean i think like this this is another thing that they're really guilty of especially like there's an entire section in here where they just keep writing about africa and it's like well and then you know and they'll get pressed on it and they'll be like no no we mean sub-saharan africa and it's like what

what are you talking like they they they won't name countries they won't name movements they won't name people it's just they'll just write something about the whole of sub-saharan africa and it's just like – Well, I think that's evidence of the kind of – of what Garrison was talking about. Yeah, and I think – And this is something you see all over the place with people writing about politics, with people trying to write about like particularly revolutionary politics in a global sense. And I think it's usually a mistake to do that for the reasons we've kind of discussed. a mistake to do that for the reasons we've kind of discussed. Anytime I see a left wing, even somebody who I think is generally on point, who starts talking about, for example, like extending

their theories about revolutionary politics to places I happen to know just a little bit about, it's always very clear, like, oh, you don't know shit about Syria. Oh, you don't know shit about Libya. Oh, you don't know shit about Angola. And that's not even a moral failing. It's just that it's impossible really to have in-depth knowledge of what's actually going on in those places and what's going on in those revolutions. It's why people default so much to the whole, well, whatever side the US is on must be the bad side and whatever side the Russians are on must be the good side. It's the easiest way to look at that shit. I think that's a worthwhile critique to make, and it's a critique to make anytime that it happens. I agree with Garrison and with Andrew that I think the thing that Desert gets right, and the thing that I've seen in my own life is that like,

the opportunities we should be looking for are not suddenly that some sort of global revolution sweeps all of the things we don't like out of power and magically institutes something better comprehensively across the globe. It's room for little anarchies. It's what we saw in northeast Syria, right? where the government pulls out and people have an opportunity to do something not perfect, but better. And I think that is, that's kind of one of the things we talk about a lot on this show.

That's why mutual aid is valuable. It's why building these connections are valuable. It's because as things crumble, there will be opportunities to, in local areas, piecemeal institute and push for more just and better ways of living. And I think that if you're looking at kind of the broad level, potentially optimistic

point is that when you have enough of those and when they spread well enough and if communication is good enough, maybe the things that work will get adopted on a wider scale. And there's always the opportunity that when enough, when ideas spread far enough, they have a tipping point and they go viral, you know, so to speak. But I,

I don't, I think that while there's a lot of specifics that desert gets wrong, I do think they were ahead of the curve and recognizing that. And I think it's, it's a more productive way to look at the idea of revolutionary change than we're going to finally have 1917, but everywhere, you know? With regard to the African chapter, the impression that I got while reading that chapter, and I think the book itself references um samba um i got the impression that the author had read um afghanonicism history of a movement by sam mba and um they were just

kind of like inspired by that i would say because as i do point out, they didn't specify the specific cultures, which is an issue considering the tendency that Westerners have of being to Africa with this large brush as if it's all one way or the other. we do see now um is you know from the horn of africa to south africa to nigeria to i mean recently sudan i believe um there are africans smaller number organizing under the man of anarchism and there are anarchic elements that continue to persist on the continent yeah i mean i i think that's like you know i mean one of the things that they sort of got they got right was about how like this the sort of the the sort of renewal despite of urban anarchism they're talking about like chile in particular they got right um indonesia bangladesh sort of somewhat but but i think i think there's there's another like my my my my biggest issue with them in terms of the way they think about ecological stuff this comes this is something i talk about

with like they they have this thing where they think that forager societies are going like okay they're they're they're they're more careful than most people to frame it as like the forging societies can be egalitarian but i i think they they they wind up talking about these sort of like the way that sort of forging nomadic societies sort of inherently defy the boundaries of the state and like that's true but you can also have like nomadic forging societies that are hereditary slave societies. And this is a problem because there's a lot in here about that. That's about sort of like, you know, they're taking

this as sort of like soft anti-civ line, right? It has a few lines where it does specifically say civilization is the cause of I think it's like civilization is genocide, which. Yeah, and that's silly. Yeah, I mean, that is heavily influenced by.

Civilizations commit genocide, sure. Yes, they do cause genocide. If you're trying to make the case that it seems to be that civilizations, well i don't know every civilization does not commit genocide but no but civilization gives is a constant yeah civilization gives you the framework that makes genocide possible well like intentionally like intentional genocide possible i don't know that i would agree with that because i think you see examples of genocide from hunter-gatherer societies and from so-called stateless societies. Obviously, documentation on that isn't as extensive because we weren't documenting things for a lot of it. But you do have examples from what we know of like the Americas of there were genocides committed by societies we would call stateless.

So I think I might argue that like genocide is a thing that human beings do in civilization yeah because it allows us to do everything on a larger scale allows us to do way better genocides that's definitely in our i think that's fair i i think i think my problem with it is is that they're going back into this sort of like they're going back into the the the you know there's this inherent binary between foragers and settled societies and that you know and and specifically they think that the the these sort that the settled societies and that you know and and specifically they think that the the sort that the forager societies are you know inevitably going to become egalitarian it's like that's not true and it's not true in ways that you you can see right now in like like like they're like there are lots of places right now where you can look at you know

forging societies that have incredibly right like there like there's – for example, you get sort of – you get the Fulani joining like right-wing Islamist groups, right? And that kind of thing, I think it has a problem with – The same thing is looking at indigenous societies and seeing them all on one side of the fight with colonizing nations as opposed – I'm reading a book about the history of the Mapuche right now, which are historically like the indigenous group in Chile that resisted the – and the indigenous group really in – you could argue in all of Latin America that resisted the longest and most effectively. But even then, when you look at like the campaigns of the Chilean government in the 1860s and 1880s, large, like significant chunks of the Mapuche sided with the government against other Mapuche. And like, that's the, like, it's always a mistake. And I think this is a good, one of the things that you get out of the dawn of everything. It's always a mistake to like look at any of these groups,

hunter-gatherers, stateless societies as like one thing or another. They're people and some of them sucked. Just like, yeah, anyway. Yeah, there is one thing that I wanted to sort of push back against. Robert, you had said that genocide is a thing that humans do. I don't think I agree with that assessment. In the sense, or at least I'd rather, I would like to clarify or give you an opportunity to clarify what you mean by that.

I don't know that it's just humans, but I think that genocide is a thing that as long as we have evidence in recorded history, it seems like we have done. Not just against other humans, but against other kind of hominid species. We have, we have examples of things that it seems fair to call genocide going back further than we have any kinds of written records. burnt and people who like groups of people tribes and whatnot who seem to have been killed in mass and you know there's there's other theories for some of that some of them may have been like people trying to stop a plague we don't plague or whatever like there's not any kind of comprehensive solidity but what we do know is that as long as we have documentations of humans doing things we have documentations of things that we could call genocide i see i see i think let's look look into that a bit more but i appreciate the clarification yeah can i can i do a balkans pivot go ahead because there's a there's a there's a thing i like i genuinely disturbed me reading it

in here about the serbs during the bosnian genocide where so they're quoting disturbing about that oh yeah but this is this is a i i uh okay so they're they're doing a they're reading a quote from the book gypsies wars and other instances of the wilds where he's talking this is about uh the bosnian genocide how is this possible in europe at the end of the 20th century was the question that played obsessively through my mind what the war in former yugoslavia forced us to digest the fact that people proved willing to make a conscious and active choice to embrace regression barbarity a return to the wildness take the serb fighters who dreamed of a return to the serbia of the epic poems where quote there was no electricity no computers when the serbs were

happy and had no cities the breeding ground of all evil and then this is this is the next thing that's that's the text coming back and commenting on it that some modern day militias reflect romantic desires while shelling towns massacring villages and being killed in turn should neither surprise us nor necessarily fully invalidate romance it does however suggest along with the honest expression of joy and destruction mouthed by some soldiers in every war as well as many anarchists that there is a coupling of some sort between a generalized urge to destroy and a disgust at a complex human society and there's there's there's another part um slightly later on they're talking about.

Ethnic diversity and autonomy will often emerge both from mutual aid in community and animosity between communities. I'd like to think, and our history has backed this up, that self-identified anarchists will never inflictational dismemberment that can be found in many inter-ethnic conflicts and in the minds of fighters more generally and i i think that's fucked i think that's true that's just wrong i don't know i think there's commenting a specific type of anarchist literature which is like the make total destroy thing and yeah i've definitely i have observed that in people the same the same urge that you're you're so broken down by everything that the only urge that is the only creative urge you have is to destroy the things around you i've seen that i don't think they're necessarily celebrating that but they're pointing out that that urge can be there don't think they're necessarily celebrating that but they're pointing out that that urge can be there what i think they get really wrong here is that i don't think that's

the urge that that is is like that that's when you're dealing with inter-ethnic conflict and when you're dealing with genocide i don't think that's the urge that's going on especially you know particularly with the serbs because the serbs like you know okay like when when an anarchist is doing mate total destroy right they're you know they're like there's there's a very specific set of things they're attacking or they're you know they're attacking building they're attacking the physical infrastructure of the world when the serbs are doing the bosnian genocide like they have a very specific thing they're doing which is killing bosnian muslims and i think that's an extremely different urge than the sort of like i i don't i don't think that's about sort of what

it's civilizational dismemberment or whatever that's about islamophobia and genocide and i think that's a different i i think the genocidal impulse is a i think a very different one than the sort of the like the impulse to break the society that has harmed you yeah i think it's important to draw a distinction between you can kill a shitload of people without it being a genocide um and i i think and it's also one of those things i think sometimes where people i i think why there's hesitation to see certain acts in early history as genocide is that they're not as complete as modern genocide but but what a genocide really is i think it's important to lay this, it's not necessarily killing every member of an ethnic group or a religious group or whatever kind of community. It is stopping their ability to propagate and continue themselves. That's why

things like destroying churches and destroying graveyards and historical markers are part of genocide. And it's also why a lot of genocides, they left the women and children alive. They would kill all the men and they would take the women in and they would breed with them they might kill the kids sometimes but it was this the goal was not necessarily we need to kill all of you it's we want to kill this this culture this population um i think the i think the i don't yeah i think the parallel he's trying to make here, or they or she, is that that type of genocidal cultural destruction is targeted against

specific groups. The difference here is with this type... He's writing this for other anarchists. He's pointing out our destructive urge, our cultural urge, isn't even for a specific group. It's just for everything. And that can be unhealthy sometimes.

Sometimes there's ways to make total destroy, that's totally fine, but that can go to unhealthy places. Now, he's not equating ethnic cleansing with that. He's like, they are different, but when your total destroy urge is against

all of culture, then yeah, that's something you should probably ponder. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely, I would agree that that's a thing that's potentially problematic, right? Like with a number of different desires, there's a way in which that can lead to people doing really fucked up things. Yeah, it's like it's pointing out that type of accelerationism, not specific to ideology, but just like accelerationism in general. I mean, I think when I talk about things like the fact that,

because not every culture commits genocides, not every civilization does. And throughout history, there have been more that found the idea repugnant than found the idea acceptable. But it is really a consistent thing in history. And I think the lesson with that isn't necessarily that everything could end in genocide. So I don't think the lesson is necessarily like, oh, you should look at make total destroy as if, you know,

this kind of trend in anarchist thought could lead to genocide. It's that people in groups are nearly always capable of killing a shitload of other people for a variety of reasons if plied in the proper ways. And so those of us who seek mass movement should always be conscious of that because human beings in large groups can do wonderful things, but there's a long history of them doing really fucked up shit, sometimes in ways that surprise the people that got the large group of human beings together in the first place. sometimes in ways that surprised the people that got the large group of human beings together in the first place. The other thing I wanted to bring up is kind of more circling back to like the Doomer kind of idea. Because, yeah, a big part of the book is trying purposely is to disillusion people with this idea of global revolution and disillusion people with the idea that we can save the Earth because we can't. So that's a big thing and first i think i think for some people if you stop right there and you that's how you end that thought yes that does lead to doomerism obviously like that that is that is but the books the book doesn't stop there

the book continues on from there now they continue on from a nihilistic standpoint i'm not a nihilist i prefer absurdism i prefer discordianism. But those two things are pretty – they are more similar than not, is that you can be disillusioned with global revolution and the idea to save the earth, but that should not change what we do or how we feel or operate as anarchists. It's not that we should be disillusioned and then do nothing and step aside. It's that we should be disillusioned and then find that disillusionment itself a form of liberation. Like, the freeing nature of being free from this idea of revolution is that, like, no, we are living our lives now. Don't live for a revolution.

Live your life now and do things now because that's what you actually have so it's like that type of nihilistic absurdist discordian thing this is this is this is this is where i come back to having problems with it again because this this is literally just there is no alternative except it's it's it's yeah and that's do anarchy but i mean i don't know but that's how i live like that's i think this is a bad i think that's a bad plan and i think if you look if you look at what happens with because we you know this this was the thing that was really big in the american anarchist movement like in you know from about 2017 like to roughly now and it's like a lot of

people were in the 2020 uprising too yeah but also that didn't succeed like that like not really like like this is like i think i think this is like like one of the reasons it didn't work like okay this is like the the thing that's important one of the things is important revolutions even when they don't succeed is that for a very brief window you actually can like it becomes it becomes possible to imagine another world yes and what what what this entire thing is saying is don't do that that's not that's not no no that's that's that's that is not what it's saying it is absolutely not this is no no no okay can i can i finish this sentence yeah like yeah okay so what what what i'm saying here is that what what they've

abandoned right the the thing that they're giving up when they give up revolution, when they're like, this is a progressive myth, this is like theology, what they've abandoned completely is our human capacity to actually shape a different world. you know essentially the combination of of ecological and social forces are strong enough that humans humans no longer have the capacity to reshape the world into a way that is different than this and that this is now the eternal present and you know and yeah inside of the eternal present they're saying you should be fighting for the same things you should be fighting for like you know you should you should be in in your own sort of local domain you should be fighting for like you know you should you should be in in your own sort of local domain you should be like i mean there are some of the recommendations are wild like i i think i think their conservation stuff is sketchy given i mean it is it doesn't it doesn't apply to an eternal present though like they lay out like the world is is changing a lot and will for the next 50 years like there will be massive changes

in how things are set up in the next century. And we need to take advantage of that. We need to turn those liabilities into assets and start making those little anarchies. That is what it's trying to do. And I would add as well

that, as it points out, the situations in Basingstoke and Bangladesh are different in the present and will be in the future you know what i think is is trying to be sort of uh drilled in here is that at least in the text and how i read it um is that yes things will be different in different parts of the world and probably maybe they won't be this, you know, or as the author says, there won't be, you know, this one global revolution. But at the end of the day, I think what it's trying to emphasize is that we don't have the structures. And I think part of what it's trying to emphasize is that we don't't have instructions in place right now to launch an interaction we can meaningly meaningfully defend and so that is

the sort of thing we should be focusing on yeah but but they but they but this and this this is this is going back to my problem with it going going back to the thing with the they go on the rant about how anarchists are like a permanent cultural majority and will never become a majority is that even even in situations where people had that capacity and did it they go back they project back onto it go no no no no they couldn't have done that like it's it's not about it's it's it's they have a belief and this is something that they do explicitly say that that anarchist will always be a permanent minority right there will always be an active but permanent minority and that is the like like that specifically i think is just a

an actual rejection of the belief that we collectively can make a better future because if if you think that our idea is that you know if being free right if if a society is mutually if you think that that is permanently always going to be a minority you are you know you are condemning you're condemning the future to the people who don't believe that and and i i i understand why especially if you know if if if the only thing you've ever known is 50 years of when the neoliberals actually did the thing right they took over the entire world restructure the entire world economy seized every government like if if that's what you lived through i understand why you would think that but i i think the fact that it was possible to do it from the other direction is in some ways a sense that like yeah we could do it too

i don't know sorry i will stop harping on this one specific point. It just extremely annoys me. long as we start building those systems in the places around us, people will start using them and people might start like living them out, even if they don't call themselves anarchists, right? Like the majority of people will probably prefer some type of state or government, right? You can even look at Rojava and be like, yeah, it still is state-ish in some ways, but some ways not, right? Like it's going, we're not going to get an anarchist world. That's not going to happen. But we can make it better through the lens of anarchy. And I think that's what it's kind of trying to say. Yeah, I think it's it's worth acknowledging that, like, yeah, the majority of people are never going to be what anarchists are right now, which is people who comprehensively reject the systems they live in.

Most people are always going to think more like, well, I want to be comfortable. I want to, I support changes kind of that, that, you know, fix this thing that I've noticed is a problem or that thing. Most people are never going to comprehensively reject the system, but I do have hope that in time and given, you know, space to build things and show people other ways and improve life for people, you can get to a point where most people believe a lot of the things that i think are important yeah i think that's what's on time i think that's what they call themselves sorry i think that's what the as specifists um tend to advocate for in terms of through the process of social insertion in these larger movements general generalizing the anarchist ideas as a whole, making them more common throughout the population.

It's not only trying to get each and every person in the world to self-identify as an anarchist, communist, or whatever. It's more so that you're trying to spread these ideas to the point where they are, I suppose, the common sentiment, the popular will yeah like i it's it's um that's like the point of culture jamming and and and shit like that like it's the the idea that like it doesn't so much matter like like what matters is inserting the things you think are important into the culture and getting people to identify with them and understand them, the terms that they specifically use

aren't as important. That's not really what matters. I don't think they're arguing that, though. They have lines like this, we cannot, however, remake the entire world. There are not enough of us. There never will be. They specifically

talk about the, oh, well, they don't have to all be anarchists and you know i mean here's their line there is unfortunately little little evidence from history that the working class never mind anyone else is intrinsically predisposed to libertarian ecological revolution thousands of years of authoritarian socialization favor the jackboot neither we nor anyone else could create a libertarian or global or ecological global future by expanding social movements. Further, there is no reason to think that in the absence of such a vast expanse, a global transformation congruent to our desires will ever happen. I think the key word there is global. Like, yeah, they're trying to break with that.

And it's important. Like, they're writing this specifically for anarchists who are kind of already nihilistic, kind of already anti-Sith, right? They are writing this for other anarchists. This isn't a book to radicalize a normie or a communist. This is written by anarchists for other anarchists to be like, hey, you already kind of think the world's kind of going

to shit. Here's a way that we can still do things despite the world being shitty. Because once you're disillusioned, it's hard to be illusioned again. we can still do things despite the world being shitty. Because once you're disillusioned, it's hard to be illusioned again. Like, once you give up on the idea of global

revolution, once you give up on the idea of global collapse, it's hard to re-enter those, even if you see things happening. Like, there can still be uprisings and revolts, absolutely. But there is a distinction between uprisings and revolts and,. But there is a distinction between uprisings and revolts and a global revolution, right?

Specifically, like the Marxist-Leninist sense. And I'd also like to continue the paragraph you're reading from there. We had said that, as anarchists, we... Or they had said that, as anarchists, we are not the seed of the future society in the shell of the old, but merely one of many elements from which the future is forming that's okay when faced with such scale and complexity there is value in non-civil humility even for insurgent yeah but this is this is just this is just giving up this this is the old uh it's too complicated it's too

like and like i think i don't know like it's it's it's giving up on it's giving up on trying to do any kind of of on on like humans as a whole trying to do any kind of large scale like you know like trying to do any large scale transformation of what the society i disagree to continue that that quote to give up hope a global anarchist revolution is not to resign oneself to anarchy, remaining an eternal protest. Seaweed puts it well. Revolution is not everywhere or nowhere. Any bioregion can be liberated through a succession of events and strategies based on the conditions unique to it, mostly as the grip of civilization in that area weakens through its own volition or through the efforts of its inhabitants. Civilization didn't succeed ever at once,

and so its undoing might only occur to varying degrees in different places at different times. Even if an area is seemingly fully under the control of authority, there are always places to go, to live in, to love in, and to resist from. And we can extend those spaces. The global situation may seem beyond us, but the local never is. And I think that's beautiful. think that's like a that's one of the things that keeps me alive is ideas like that honestly and at the same time i also

hold the opinion that none of us including this author is a fortune teller you know the desert's picture of the future is not the only possibility you know and i think in a lot of ways in a lot of ways i believe that they can and have already been proven wrong you know like and there's an issue that i really take a lot of contention with the book part of the book that really pisses me off is the sort of persistence of the overpopulation myth yeah that was i don't remember it being so consistent since i reread it um a couple of weeks ago yeah and also this sort of nonchalance the author seems to have about like mass die-offs and that kind of thing you know i think yeah that's very troubling to me that's very specific to its type of anti-civ literature that's like we view civilization is going to progress towards genocide

anyway and the way to actually avoid more deaths is to kind of help the collapse along because that'll end civilization quicker so therefore less people less people will be born so less people will have to die so that's the type of thinking they have. I don't necessarily agree with that. Necessarily. But, like, yeah, that is very typical of this type of literature. So, again, because it is written mostly for other anti-civ anarchists. But, like, yeah, it's not, like, pro-genocide. It's saying genocide will happen, So the way to make less of it is to actually kind of slowly start kind of help helping the crumbles along, essentially.

And while still, you know, making people's lives better in your immediate community, like with that with that very local focus. So, again, not not saying I necessarily agree with that, but that's the that's the type of thought it's engaging with. that but that's the that's the type of thought it's engaging with i mean i i think that's true of some of it but there is definitely a lot of like panic about there's going to be nine billion people and like population growth yes all of that's like all the overpopulation stuff's a little iffy you know there is a discussion to have on carrying capacity but we are not there yet we right now we way overproduced for them for the amount of people we have yeah that and that i don't know that also frustrated me immensely they're like yeah we we have because they're talking about carrying capacity right but they're like oh we already can't we have a billion people going hungry and it's like yeah but that's not about the

carrying capacity that's just a distribution hungry. And it's like, yeah, but that's not about the carrying capacity. That's just a distribution problem. That's about distribution. It's literally just distribution. That idea gained more prevalence after Desert was written. We kind of more understood culturally that it is a distribution issue, not necessarily a production issue. Now, we do overproduce, right? And the amount of production we have contributes to stuff like climate change.

And that is bad. So we should tone down production but we should make ways that it's more sustainable and ecological um yeah that i think that does point towards the dated nature of the text i think also my last like thing with it is i i think i think it it could have benefited a lot from like in an indigenous stewardship, because the way it thinks about wildness versus conservation is just very messy. some other anti-civ things that i've seen but it definitely falls into the like trap of like here is the wild and then any attempt to manage it is uh you know is is civilization and you need to go back to the wild and it's like well this is already stewarded and managed yeah yeah that is the one yeah it does fall on that slope slope of nature being an other that is sacred,

which isn't necessarily a great idea, nor is it really true. Yeah, this is very 2010. Very 2010. Yeah. Right, so I think the book is critical of conservation in a sort of binary way, and I agree that an indigenous stewardship perspective was sorely needed but at the same time i do think that the way that the book criticizes um or rather just points out um the issue of conservation may may have been on may still be new for some people

you know the idea that these sorts of government conservation projects, which sort of preside over this sort of static vision of nature and ecology and stuff that is supposedly threatened by humanity. I think criticizing that approach to nature is good. I mean, this sort of romanticization of the wild that is very typical of antisive text and thought is very much antisive, but I do believe that people should look or should rather resist the sort of conservation impulse. As I was rereading it a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to know what you guys thought of the section of the book that speaks

of the different modern, different, the idea of fourth and fifth generation war oh boy that's uh um i feel that that has been um sort of a controversial approach to analyzing conflict so i figured i would as you have been in, you know, actual war zones, Robert, that you might have a thing or two to say. Um, I mean, it's the kind of thing that we should probably cover in, in detail on,

um, cause this is a lot of like William Lind stuff. I think he's the guy who came up with the idea of like fourth generation war, at least, and it's, um, it's basically the, it's the idea that warfare,

um, today is conducted through a lot of stuff that's not conventional weaponry, right? So stuff like putting bot networks together to like push social division through social media or carrying out cyber attacks on infrastructure, disinformation, all of that kind of stuff, which is I think accurate. I've been reporting on what you could call fifth-generation warfare since 2014. I think one thing that people on the left need to acknowledge is that they have been blindsided by the effectiveness that the far right has adapted to the key components of this kind of warfare. And I think nothing is more key than social engineering and disinformation. And they've been much more successful at it over the last – really since 2015 in particular than the left has by basically everywhere every single and by i think every single measure of of success and i i think this is something we should save in in depth for another day um but i i think that it is worth acknowledging this is and i i also think that and this is again part of a bigger conversation.

We talk about the concept of like culture jamming. We talk about like Operation Mindfuck, which is a discordian idea, all of which you can see as kind of predecessors to the concepts of fifth generation warfare. argument to be made that those efforts by leftists in the 80s and 90s in particular actually contributed to the substantial right-wing victories that we're seeing right now in this space. And I think maybe it's – I think there's a number of reasons for that, including some – to some extent the idea of arrogance that what – that we were just too smart, that they were never going to figure out how to utilize the same means we had or to kind of judo like take the momentum for that and spin it around on us but they were and they did and um yeah that'll that'll lead into another episode we'll have to talk about this in more detail that's something like grant morrison actually talks a lot about

in regards to discordianism and this type of how how you know he used to work for a company called disinformation back when disinformation was yeah yeah and and now it's like one of the leading causes of mass death in the world right yeah so he that is something that morrison talks about a lot in terms of how they did have that arrogance and now the same forces that they used in hopes of making the world better and now being used to regress the world and make it worse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I had a big copy of disinformation on my coffee table when I was 19. I just ordered one. Oh, good. There's some fun essays in there. There sure is. Um, all right.

That'll probably, I i mean did you have more to say on that and yeah i just want to say that you know regardless of the uncertain future um regardless of your stance on desert's message however flawed um here now as the minor birds in aldous huxley's island so often repeat um we can and should pay attention to what we can do to support ourselves for whatever outcome you know through you know projects within the spaces we inhabit i believe that anarchism can be the seed of the new world i do believe that we have an impact a huge impact on society and on politics. And I believe there are still many possibilities for liberty still.

Yeah, I do as well. I think that acknowledging, you know, failures both of, you know, ideas and of methods doesn't mean giving up hope or ignoring the successes of those same things, which are also present. Yeah. So I don't know. Stay optimistic. Read something.

It doesn't have to be a desert, but just go read a thing. Go read a thing. Read the back of your shampoo bottle. Yeah, back of your shampoo bottle, especially if it's Dr. Bronner's. A lot of good stuff in there. Alright. That's going to do it for us this week. Take care.

For today, at least. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast we already recorded, and I messed up. Or something happened with the Zoom and we lost the audio, so now we're recording it again. As is the cycle of life. Thankfully, I'm now on my tenth shot of espresso of the day, and 8 p.m., so I'm ready. I am ready this time. Today, we're going to be doing another one of our chronicles into open-source and OSINT-style research, or open-source verification, and this kind of side of generally, you know, this is kind of a field of like anti-fascist research and journalism. So we're looking at one of these case studies. But today I have someone with me. Alistair from Opossum Press is here to talk about OSINT and this type of research. Hello.

Hi. and this type of research. Hello! Hi! Thank you for being with me again on this call, on this very déjà vu experience for us. I would actually first like to

talk about how Opossum Press got started as a collective of people dedicated towards this goal of, you know, surveying the fascist creep um i i had an interest in um in journalism i have no experience in it but i have other friends that are into writing and stuff and i i just kind of reached out to friends i'm like hey would anybody be interested in doing this and um there are several friends that were like, hell yeah, let's do this.

And that's pretty much it. After we got it all formed, we set up some open source Intel workshops. Cool. And about every other week, we'd get together for two, three hours and learn stuff. That sounds lovely actually um most of my stuff is usually done alone in my computer dark when i'm on my again 10th cup of coffee of the day doing osint in a group of people like that sounds like it could be actually kind of fun so yeah we're gonna in our last episode we talked about uh how i tracked down uh and found out who Rittenhouse was the night of that

happening in Kenosha. And today we're going to be talking about someone related to January 6th, the infamous zip tie guy as he became known for like two days on the internet before he got his actual name.

First, I guess in case you haven't listened to the previous episode I did on Rittenhouse before he got his actual name. First, I guess I probably, in case you haven't listened to the previous episode I did on Rittenhouse, I should probably kind of explain what open source stuff is and what OSINT is and verification. So it's about trying to track down information using open sources on the internet.

So in terms of like nothing is, it's already sitting there. Nothing requires like special access. Nothing requires, you know, you to hack into anyone's system. It's stuff is just, the stuff that's already sitting there.

The data, whether that be, you know, geographical data, personal data, data from social media accounts, data from every time you've entered your email

into a random website that you maybe didn't know quite what's going on, but you did it. That gets stored somewhere as data, and someone can probably find it. So it's all this stuff about you on the internet that is all open if you do the digging. Often cases, this results in going through social media profiles. That is a good portion of OSINT work, is learning how to use Google really well and how to go through

social media. Start using Google search operators, start using social media tools that help you sort through information, because the information's there, you just have to learn how to sort through it, right? Because there's just so much of it. So that's kind of the gist of what open source stuff is.

Eventually you can get into stuff like using Python, using code and scrapers. All that stuff is there too. But for our purposes we're going to stick to the more simplistic stuff because this is an audio format and I'm not going to start explaining Python code on a podcast. Right.

So let's turn back the clocks a year. A little over a year. And it's Right. So as January 6th is unfolding, what's what's kind of going through everyone at a possum presses head? The first thing that seemed to be collective in everybody's mind was, oh, my God, none of these people are wearing face masks. Yeah. Yeah. Like the immediate thing is this is probably going to be really easy for a lot of people. There's nobody nobody is in any type of block or trying to hide their identity at all. Something you see the

European fascists actually doing more often. There was a video from Germany of a whole bunch of far-right dudes just in black block because black block is a tactic. So yeah, but in the States, specifically on january 6th it was yeah no one was really worried about keeping their identity a secret they really did not think what they were doing was wrong i think the other thing we were a lot of us were really angry um

yeah like we had been like yelling that this was going to happen, screaming it out, like trying to get people to pay attention. And we got blown off so much. I remember just like a few days before I got in an argument with a Facebook friend. I'm like, people need to be paying attention. Like they're planning something. They're like, oh, it's fine. It's fine. And then, you know, just a few days later, I'm like, it's fine it's fine and then you know just a few days later i'm like oh is

it fine that is kind of always the curse of surveilling all of these things whether they be like a specific event or just a movement in general right people who are really into q anon before the libs knew what q anon was and were warning about it for years before you know it resulted in people dying um right that's that's kind of always the curse of these things it's a it's it you get you get the mix of the shock and horror of the thing finally happening and a weird relief it's it's yes it's it's it's a very bizarre feeling to watch these things unfold because you're like oh i'm vindicated but it sucks that I'm vindicated. Right. I remember like the December watching all these groups. Like I was just, it was just filled with dread.

Yeah. I knew something was going to happen. I didn't know what was going to happen. And it was just so much anxiety. And then like, it's funny, January 6th, after it happened, like it all went away. I was able to get a decent night's sleep just because there was, I didn't have that buildup of suspense of what, what is it going to be? What's it going to look like? How bad is it going to be? It kind of had that release. Yeah. Unfortunately they were all like amateur and didn't know what they were doing and it wasn't as

bad as it could have been. Yeah. Well, I think as for the open source stuff, I'm going to kind of walk us through chronologically in terms of the journey of ZipTieGuy. Because I was doing archiving on January 6th, but ZipTieGuy was really

the only dude I was interested in identifying. There was a lot of other people doing really great identification work. I was also, in January 6th, I was going through all the social media history of Ashley Babbitt, archiving all of her Twitter and Facebook.

Years of stuff. I was to chronicle how she went from an Obama voter to a QAnon proponent. That was what I was doing, and I was writing an article with Bellingcat about that. But the only other guy I wanted to identify was Zip Tie Guy because he was really interesting.

He was one of the few guys that was masked up. He had visible weapons on him. He was obviously carrying zip ties. It gives you images of like, oh yeah, it's like they're planning to capture and execute people. That was like the general kind of vibe of that. So he was the picture of the guy holding the zip ties in a mask. There's a few other pictures of him around from that day, but it's mostly one picture. And the biggest clue that we had to start with, why don't you explain what the first clue is and how that maybe piqued your interest? Could you explain what the first clue is and how that maybe piqued your interest?

He had two patches on his vest, and one of them was a thin blue line patch, but it was in the shape of the state of Tennessee. So, yeah, in terms of having a decent lead, that is like, okay, well, that narrows it down to one of 50 states probably, right? Yeah, I should say I'm from Knoxville. So like it being Tennessee, I picked up on that because that's my state. Yeah, that it becomes a local problem. As someone in Oregon, I definitely understand that feeling of, yeah, when fascism becomes a local problem. Yeah, so that definitely piqued your interest specifically, but then also gives a really good lead for, like, where to look, because odds are he's not trying to do a meta thing by tricking us into giving us a false lead. Generally, people don't do that as often in real life as they do in television. Um, but there's still plenty other ways to detect. I mean, I, I love, I love detecting and there's, there's enough, there's enough stuff to do otherwise that making it needlessly complicated is honestly, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm fine with it not being that. so starting looking for like far-right activity in tennessee you know i was an outsider so i didn't really know where to start in terms of specific rallies but i know you uh at what point did you start looking trying to like go through pictures of specific rallies to try to like match

clothing or stuff i think it was probably it may have been that day or the day after is when I started going through the notebooks that I had, um, like names of just people we suspected may become problems. Um, and I started looking at their profiles again and, you know, didn't find anything. And in our research that we had already done,

we didn't see anything on. Okay. Yeah. I mean, that was kind of the case for me as well with just the picture of the zip tie guy with the patch. I mean, it's,

it's a lead, but there wasn't tons to go on, but thankfully, thankfully our, our, our good friends at January 6th, we're giving us more clues as, because as the Simpsons meme goes,

videotaping this crime scene was the best idea we ever had. So on January 7th, there was a livestream video that was circulating through anti-fascist group chats. It was posted publicly to get everyone's attention on it on January 8th. But for a day, it was passing through back channels. And in this livestream which is, yeah, there was so many people were livestreaming that night and it is a kind of surreal thing to watch

of them, this livestream in particular a zip tie guy, a few of his friends I think his mom and just random people from January 6th all hanging out at a hotel room afterwards it is the night of the 6th, and they're all just hanging out. Again, totally, like, no masks. They're in a hotel lobby. No masks.

And they're just, like, hanging out and chilling, like, sitting on the couch and chatting for, like, half an hour. It's one of the weirdest videos to watch. All of the livestreams from that night are so surreal because it is like this transitionary period of like after the capital attack but before every before like people like go down on them so they don't really know how to behave they still think what they did was kind of fine even though at this point i think like four or five people are dead um but it's so weird to watch them just interact like such normal people in this moment like after they did this thing, then they go in this hotel room

and they're acting completely normal. It's just a weird video in general, but what it does have is someone in the same outfit as Zip Tie Guy with no mask on. We actually can see his full face. Yep. Getting to see his full face was a

big moment for us. Big help! Everyone was looking for pictures of this guy without his mask for the entirety of the day. So now having a whole video where we could see all of the angles of him was great. It was perfect. The best thing. That was really the beauty of all of the January 6th documentation is how many people were live streaming themselves doing crimes and their friends. It did make the archiving and,

well, not the archiving part. Archiving is always painful and tedious, but it made the actual research afterwards a lot easier because there was so much documentation of it. So yeah, we got this video. I'm going to explain how I kind of took this video and failed to reach the conclusion, and then we can talk about how you succeeded. But first, we're going to hear some ads from

our lovely products and services. Robert was here for our previous recording that we tried, and I failed. And he made some very good jokes and very good segues about how all of our sponsors support insurrection, just like January 6th and if I try to repeat the jokes it'll be stupid, so I'm just gonna give you the sense that it was a joke and now you're gonna be left with that dissatisfaction so, goodbye

here's some ads okay, we're back, and I'm gonna give an extremely brief rundown on how I failed to do uh well i i didn't fail to do research i did research i just didn't reach a proper conclusion um and i knew that so the the other the other thing about zip tie guy was he he had he had the patch of like the thin blue line in tennessee and then at then i soon after got the the video of his face and interacting with people. And the other thing is I think the hat he was wearing in the ZipTieGuy photo was I think was tracked back to be our favorite coffee company, Black Rifle Coffee Merchandise.

It was like one of the hats they sell. merchandise. It was one of the hats they sell. So me being clever, I'm like, okay, here's this Black Rifle Coffee hat, this patch in Tennessee. I know Black Rifle Coffee is based out of Tennessee. I'm going to go look through everyone who works for Black Rifle Coffee, which I mean, isn't a bad instinct as an outsider, but it did not succeed. But the funny thing is, is that while looking through all the employees at Black Rifle Coffee, all of them do look identical to Zip Tie Guy. Same characteristics. They all look exactly the same. Their beards, their nose, their forehead, their hair, all of them identical.

Every single one of them. To the point where the only way I could tell that it wasn't Z zip tie guy was being like okay no he has a mole here he has like a birthmark here this way his like his eyes or his eye wrinkles are different so it's like it's going down to the very like fine-tuned facial features because all of their face shapes are like identical

I think there was a point that I had the same instinct I think I know there's a point that I went through the black coffee rifle all of their people I had the same instinct. I think I, I know there's a point that I went through, um, the black coffee rifle, all of their people looking at, um, I don't know if it was for Eric Wunschel or if it was like maybe around the written house stuff. I don't know. Yeah. So that's, that's what I spent my time, is going through everybody who works there. But by the time I kind of him without a mask to the point where you could say, hey, this is his name. Well, I wasn't even really in contact with,

like, we as a group weren't messaging each other trying to figure this out together, but we were, like, it turns out a few of us were working separately. So while I'm going through social media, a friend in Nashville was going through pictures of the protests from there over the summer. And they ended up finding about five different pictures, I think. And we knew, we knew most of the people in the pictures that are maybe like one or two that we did not know. And one was always Eric Munchell. And he's wearing the exact same gear he wore January 6th. I say Eric Munchell.

We didn't know his name yet then. So from there, we kind of we went ahead and posted what we had to Twitter. And then we went back to the social media and I started looking through the profiles that were the people we knew. And sure enough, one of them, Kurt Dennis, had a live stream that was telling the story, the same story that Eric Munchell told in that 30 minute video and he actually while telling it he's like yeah my buddy eric great so at that point we go to his friends list and sure enough he only has one eric there and it's eric munchell and there we go to that page and find some of the same gear in the background of the pictures that he has publicly posted. Yeah.

He like posted pictures of him and his gear with like guns and yeah, you can, you can track all of his like facial, like, like, like, like birthmarks and stuff. They're all the same.

So yeah, you, and that that's you, you definitely got them. Yeah. Your own mistakes. Yeah. That's, that's my favorite part.

They gave us his identity. They often, if not handing themselves to you on a silver platter, they at least have a platter. There's often enough bread. The reason why these things are solved is because there are enough breadcrumbs to follow. And often they kind of leave pretty big chunks of bread. Just the fact that again adding to the surreal aspect of that whole live stream video the fact that he's like you matched

it by telling the same you could hear them someone tell the same story it's just such a weird weird surreal thing yeah so i think in terms of like osin, what this case study in particular really highlights is the importance of archival stuff, right? The reason why you were able to solve this and not me is because I wasn't, I mean, I did my own archival thing for archiving like the video, but the way that you were able to really crack this open and everyone else who worked on it is because you had like those lists of connections of people who are already kind of active in this like alt-right far-right scene within your local community like you already had documentation of the major players who they interact with or you already had pictures of this guy in gear

with other known people so the fact that there was already previously work archived really made the success of this so much more possible. That's what they, People's Plaza in Nashville during their protests, they were really big on documenting. They documented everything with the police and any counter protesters. They had professional

photographers out there making sure we had good clear quality pictures of like everybody on the other side as well and that definitely helped us a lot yeah because off especially before January 6th they there was they did a decent job of archiving themselves well not not archiving but like filming themselves and documenting themselves and then you know it takes takes other researchers to then archive that so not only is it important just to like look at the research and look at like the documentation of the that people do of themselves but then make sure that you have a source for that that's not their own uploading of it. Right. So like a great example is like all of the live streams from January 6th, including like this one from this hotel room, pretty soon it was deleted by the

person who posted it because they realized, oh, maybe I shouldn't have this living record of my crimes. But at that point, people already saved the video. They already, like, I already ran it through a video saving program that I had. So it's important not only to, again, archiving, having previous documentation of people and known players, but then as new information is coming out, make sure you make separate copies of that for your own sake so that you actually have it. And then you're not going to be stuck looking for something that's gone. Right. The worst case scenario is like, you know, that there was an important thing, but you

just don't have access to it anymore. It's like you remember seeing it, but you didn't save it. And now it's gone. That's a horrible feeling to do when you're trying to get this kind of research done. And like, it happens. We all, we all make mistakes like this. I definitely have. It happened to me actually this week. Yeah, it happens. We all, we all make mistakes like this. I definitely have. It happened to me actually this week.

Yeah, it happens all the time. It happens to me, it happens to me all the time. I'll look at something and be like, I should probably save this. I get distracted or I just don't want to because archiving is boring and tedious. And then I check again, that's gone. I'm like, well, that's, I should, I should have archived it. So on top of all of the archiving stuff, which in general, anti-fascist research is really that's the thing that really excels at even like above above journalism is like, you know, getting like traditional journalism is like getting a good documentation of like key fascist players in your area. fascist players in your area, key people who are kind of pushing far-right stuff and far-right violence, actually getting a good idea

of who they are and having that knowledge always handy is something that this type of research is really what it excels at or what those researchers excel at. This is the thing that they do very well. I think a lot of us probably started

doing it just out of curiosity looking into people and i said that's that is certainly how i started like i've been doing it long before i just didn't know that's what it was called because like i'd see somebody make a messed up comment online i'm like who is this person and then you know try to find as much as I can about them. Yeah. Uh, that's, that is certainly how I got started with this type of thing. Uh, because it, it, it can be fun to look for bad people. It is, it is, it is kind of pleasurable. Um, and one of, one of the, again, another big contributing factor and how you got zip tie guy,

Again, another big contributing factor in how you got ZipTieGuy, how I got written, how a lot of this stuff works, is the beauty of Facebook as a research tool. Because often, in order to do the archiving, you need to have stuff to archive. And a lot of the stuff that gets posted from these things by the people doing them is done on Facebook, or at least it used to, right? The past five years, really, Facebook has been the main source of this. Now people are kind of getting wise and maybe some stuff's moving to Telegram. Facebook's becoming a little bit less important of a platform for this type of research. And I know Facebook has changed the way that you can use their service, so it does make research kind of harder in some ways. But even still, it is one of the better tools to dig into certain types of people, because there is certain types of people who

are going to be more likely to use Facebook. And yeah, in terms of how getting – Facebook was the method, the place where you're able to make the link between the fascists you already knew and Eric because you already knew who the players were, and then Facebook had the visualized network to actually make those connections. So Facebook itself and social media in general is really, is really useful. And then in terms of how this operates, like going through friends lists is really easy. But oftentimes a lot of people will not maybe have those public. And what, what then there's, again, it's not a dead road. You can still look through likes, you can still look through shares. You can still look through like if You can still look through if people are tagged in photos. It really is a great system that is good at making you not have privacy. That is the thing.

It really excels it. if people don't have like an active social media presence per se, it can still be really useful in getting specific names of people or, or just make, or just having a connection be known like this. This was mostly how I was able to identify the, all the anonymous riot cops in 2020 when, when the Portland police Bureau took, took away their badge numbers and

names um is that i could get like a list of cops and we could start figuring out like okay this is probably this is this is this is pre cops previously on the right team right you start doing facial matching um and then if i want to learn out if i want to if i want to learn more information about like their first name and more information about them in general, even if they don't have a social media profile, often their wife might or their mom might. In terms of fun sentences to say, really learning how to exploit people's family as a weakness is wonderful for this type of stalking violent bad people. Because, yeah, a lot of the riot cops were smart enough to not, at least to either not have a presence at all on the internet or to have it very locked down in terms of, you know, no one can see their posts, no one can see their friends, no one can see anything. But still, their wife will occasionally

tag them in photos or maybe not even photos of them, but their wife will occasionally tag them in photos or uh maybe not even photos of them but like they'll they'll just tag them in a photo of like their kid or something and then this just creates more ways to make connections so that you can you know learn more about these specific people um because sometimes that's fun and interesting yeah i've noticed some people with socks that i've found their identity. It's by going through the likes and seeing, you know, the same woman is always the first to put a heart react there. And you can go to their page and sometimes it's as little if you go through their pictures and you see a picture of the guy they're with, they'll have like somebody in the comments. Oh, Mark looks really good there, or something naming the

husband, and from there you can get the last name. You've known the wife's last name. You have a good chance of that being their last name. Yeah. So family is really great for finding people.

Because all this research is learning how to make these open-sourced connections. A lot of it is connections and networking, and people usually always have an innate connection and networking, and that is their family. And often this extends out in terms of political organizing, whether you're part of militias or just kind of smaller groups. Yeah, that is another network. Friends is another network. But for people who are kind of – are more locked down, it is possible to find information about people. Especially if they have like a not very common last name, that can make finding information about them much easier if you're using tools like facebook um then it's you know just a matter of doing all the other you know open source research of you know comparing clothing um you know and comparing

to what other kind of information you already know about the person email addresses phone numbers if you can you know get that get that kind of stuff as well but I think that's all I had on zip tie guy mostly. Yeah, he was a really easy one. There's not a whole lot to really dive into there. Yeah, no, for someone who was one of the few people masked up, was not

that hard to find. I mean, yeah, of course, the fact that he was found by local people in his area, not surprising. That's another thing anti-fascist research is really good at, is that type of local research, because they have all those local connections.

They have those local documentation of political events that have happened in their area. So, again, it's the importance of having stuff archived and having stuff like sorted and having stuff organized well, so you can access your archive information is really important. It's,

it's, it sucks. It's, it's the part of OSINT I hate the most. Everyone, everyone hates it. Everyone hates, I'm sure there is some sicko out there who likes it,

but everyone else, everyone else hates all of the... We hate all this organizing and sorting, and I find archiving to be tedious. Archiving videos and live streams, it's tedious. It's difficult. Time-consuming. It's time-consuming.

It's repetitive. It's generally not a good time, but it is so useful in the long run of trying to get a list of established players in your area. This is how you start seeing patterns, right? You need to have this information already laid out so you can actually watch the patterns unfold.

Otherwise, it's just a whole bunch of chaotic information that means nothing. So, it's super important as much of a bummer as it may be. Let's see. Is there anything you've been working on since then that you would like to talk about or any upcoming research projects? Right now, I'm really focused on our local school board. board and you know like many towns across the country we have fascists trying to take it over and going to the meetings and so i've been watching that group very closely for the last

several months it's probably about october our school year we started out without a mask mandate um okay and a couple of parents um whose children need like their their immunocompromised like their their kids need the everybody else to wear a mask so their parents sued the school board and our governor um to have a mask mandate and the judge issued an injunction and like the next monday all the schools had to wear a mask and the anti-mass crowd is like losing their shit over it still um trying to figure out how to fire the judge um it's a like yeah we have um a member of patriot church okay who's involved in it and you know they're the ones with uh church of planned parenthood it's ken peters who i think he's from washington yes spokane i believe yeah and he's he's moved down here um i think he still goes up there to the church stuff but most of his time is spent down here in tennessee

and um causing just as much trouble as he does up there and his followers so i'm curious to see how how does a research project like this school board thing differ from like the research surrounding you know trying to identify someone at january 6th surrounding, you know, trying to identify someone at January 6th? For one, this is local. It's, you know, I'm going to the school board meetings. I know it's easier to know where to look for this because like, I'm watching it as it happening, where like, you know, January 6th, most of those people, you have no clue where to even start from. So this more now it's, it's monitoring and documenting as we've, you know, figure out who these people are like

linking telegram names with Facebook names and all of that. So I guess now it's more record keeping and getting that documentation done early. So when one of them goes too far, we have, we have it ready. I mean, that's, that's,

that's the sad part where it's like, you're watching inevitable inevitability almost as you can mean that. But that, yeah, that's also how like January 6th works, right. We were able to identify these people because there was a lot of documentation of a lot of major players already. Right. So a lot of the work in between these big protests and events is is the

is this is the slow tedious documentation because we have to do it now so that it's useful later that's you know a big part of research is like yeah trying to spot potential you know issues and archiving it and then if the issue ever becomes a bigger issue you already have information on it right whether that be you know watching someone online who you might think is like watching someone who's like a nazi who you might be worried that like they're posting and plans about how to kill people you're like okay to probably look into this dude because he's doing this in case he does something in the future.

It is, that is kind of a, it sucks because, yeah, you are watching this thing where you feel kind of helpless, but you know that documenting it is worthwhile. It's the same thing where, like, you don't want to be vindicated, but

if it does happen, it's better to be prepared. Right, right. Because I don't think people realize, like, how much anti-fascist research, how much of this type of, like, OSINT stuff, like my journalism, like, most of the work that you put into it is never seen. Even if you do complete investigations, sometimes by the end, you're like, it's getting them out in enough time for them to be useful. Sometimes it isn't even worth it. So, you know, a lot of it is, you know, writing stuff and doing research that never actually sees the light of day for a long, long time. Right. With Eric Munchell, we have like probably 20 people we had on our list, too. And he wasn't even one of them.

probably 20 people we had on our list too and he wasn't even one of them yeah so you do all this like on one hand it almost felt in a moment like all of that we did was really for nothing but no it did lead to it did yeah it it did lead and even when you do find the correct answer sometimes sometimes could via circumstances you know it's not something you need to post about immediately. Sometimes it's worth just hanging on to and not being super public about every horrible thing you find. You don't need to post

every time you find a horrible thing on Telegram. You don't need to tell Twitter that. It's like it's about collecting these things and keeping them there for future use. Well, thank you so much for coming on to talk with me again after already discussing mostly the same things. Where can people follow your stuff online? We're on Twitter at Apostle opossum press um really easy

yeah yeah we're on facebook we don't actually do much on facebook though um yeah as we've discussed now you probably probably shouldn't facebook should not be like in in a lot of ways a lot of like fascist organizing that used to be done in primarily like facebook groups or just even just like through like like incidental organizing through just through like posting and cross posting a lot of that has been you know moved over to telegram at this point telegram is kind of the new main nexus whereas facebook in like the days of the early alt-right facebook was a pretty big nexus for like the more normies right you know it's there there is actually like fascist forms that were're doing organizing,

but as a place for, again, like a lot of people in January 6th who didn't really know what they were doing was wrong. They, they, they were mostly, you know,

make America great again, people are queuing on people, but a good portion of like most of them were not, you know, swastika waving Nazis. Um, they may, they may agree with fascist ideas,

but they don't self-describe as Nazis. But we're even seeing after January 6th with Facebook cracking down on these groups, other platforms like Parler going offline, a lot of these normies themselves are even migrating onto Telegram. So, you know, Facebook used to be a really great research tool and i'm using it less and less less and less often now unfortunately because i mean it really did have a lot of strong suits telegram does have its own strong suits but you know it's it's still it's

still different i think the normies move into telegram is troubling though because they're not having a way easier time that is that is that is the obvious thing is yeah now that those groups are in closer proximity it's easier for one to seep into the other whereas before there was more of that distinction um yes that is a worrying thing that i believe we've talked about before and we'll talk about again in the future in terms of having this fascist milieu or cultic milieu of a place where the amount of overlap between

your uncle who's a regular conservative and a member of Atomwaffen or someone who wishes they were a member of Atomwaffen is very small. They are very close together. Well,

thank you for talking about all of these things on our second OSINT case study episode. Big takeaways is archiving is great. Archive live streams, archive things, because it's better to have them and not

use them than not have them and need them. And then, you know, archiving and documenting local fascists is really great, even for things beyond your locality, like in January 6th. So those are my main takeaways from this, and, you know, also everyone at

Black Rifle Coffee, they all look like everyone at J6. All of them do. They do. All right. That does it for us. Thank you so much. You can follow them at Apostle Press.

Goodbye, everybody. Bye. Bye. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the only podcast you are legally allowed to listen to right now.

I'm Robert Evans. We talk about things falling apart, putting them back together, all that good stuff. With me as, like 70% of the time, is my co-host Garrison Davis. Garrison, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. This is early for you. Yeah, they had to drag me out of bed, but I made it, and I'm excited to talk about our topic. A hair after three.

A hair after three. I have my second coffee already, so yeah. Our topic is gun culture. And to discuss gun culture with me and a number of aspects of it, including how to maybe make a better one, is Carl Casarda from InRangeTV. Carl, welcome to the program. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm really stoked to be here. And it's a topic, as you can imagine, with my work on InRangeTV is near and dear to my heart because it's a challenging one. We've with my work on in range tv is uh near and dear

to my heart because uh it's a challenging one we've got a lot of great things in this community and a lot of challenges too yeah gun youtube has gotten some really interesting places in the last um really it feels like most of the growth happened like the last five six years like there's been a real significant increase in yeah i feel like there's been like a wave i feel like there's generations of gun tube there's like gen one gen two gen three and they're yeah you had fps russian back in the day and stuff totally yeah and so there's a whole thing there there's there's generations of what was addressed in the conversation and the cultural significance as well as the gear impact i think we've got different kind of generations of it yeah and i think the stuff

obviously when when aspects of gun youtube go viral it tends to be stuff that's like particularly problematic but in my experience most of it is just dudes shooting stuff to see what happens or you know trying out different guns and stuff like it is mostly if you're someone who you know believes in the right to bear arms it's mostly pretty much just like people trying out guns and stuff with guns. Yeah. Yeah. When things go viral, it's like my, my experience with that, there's a number of reasons.

One is that it's particularly gross. Someone does something or says something fucked up. Somebody is out there dressed as a rotation. All right. Stuff like that, that tends to, tends to push the buttons. But yeah, most of the time, the stuff that gets the largest volume of viewership are quite honestly more banal it's things like a 50 caliber ak exploding or shooting a gallon you know a 55 gallon drum of gas that kind of stuff is the that stuff that appeals to people that aren't just gun people so they're like

oh i want to see shoot explode so let me click on it. One of my favorite things is to look at videos of people destroying Safe Life Vests. It's one of my favorite ways to watch gun YouTube. But I guess this is probably we'll probably talk about this as the episode goes on, but once you watch enough of those from one channel, you'll get to a video

where they fantasize about shooting Antifa or something, and you're like, okay, well, yeah, that's just the way it goes something. And you're like, okay, well, yeah, that, yeah, that's just the way it goes sometimes. And it is, you know, the thing that my first, I guess, the first time I became aware of like online gun culture was a site that's still really near and dear to my heart. I'm sure you're familiar with it, Carl, the Box of Truth.

And it was like, and I think this is like 15 years ago or something like that is when I started reading their stuff. And it's just like some kind of bubba-y dudes in Texas who will take different, who will try out like, hey, there's a myth that this specific round in Korea got stopped by people who were wearing multiple layers of like clothing

in the cold. Can winter clothing stop this bullet? And they would mock up the clothing on like a target and they would shoot it. Or like how many books does it take? Like if you have a. Or like how many books does it take? Like if you have a full backpack, how many books would it take to stop a round of 9 millimeter? Like it's all very much like practical. Hey, people say this works this way or this works that way.

Well, let's go out and shoot some stuff and test how it works. And I think was like – it's as you said, the kind of thing – I think even if you don't own guns, you might find interesting just because like a lot of it is dealing with here's things you've seen in Hollywood, what actually happens. So I do think like fundamentally, there's always going to be a place for that kind of content because it's not just like stuff that people who like guns are interested in. It's just stuff that has kind of objective value. You know, you're trying to expand what people's understanding of things. Yeah, I call that gee whiz content. It's like gee whiz, what happens if right? Yeah. And so on in range, the closest equivalent to that, which are the videos that get the most views are somewhat now infamous mud tests. And it started off six years

ago. And it was literally it was gee whiz, let's go do this. And of course, there's this long standing lore everywhere outside of the gun community and in it about the AKM being this it was g whiz let's go do this and of course there's this long-standing lore it everywhere outside of the gun community and in it about the akm being this undestruct indestructible unicorn you write into combat that no matter what happens to it it fires and the ar-15 being this fragile piece of shit and in our mud test of which we've now done multiple of it while initially it was just g whiz over time in aggregate it turned out to actually have really interesting data points in that the ak doesn't do well in mud and the ar excels in mud which is completely against the lore about vietnam which is a different problem but that kind of thing extends beyond

the gun community because people are like guns and mud what happened it's gee whiz it's myth busters kind of stuff yeah yeah and i think but it's interesting how you can learn from it yeah and i think one of the problems that is, we could say, like, is an issue on gun YouTube, and one of the things that has become an issue in this isn't just within the gun culture, it's everywhere, is that, like, if you're into that stuff

and if you're coming into it, like, I want to see people do this gee whiz stuff, or I just want to see reviews of different guns, because I might be buying one. Google's algorithm is going to feed you a lot of stuff, and some of that stuff is going to be reviews of different guns because I might be buying one. Google's algorithm is going to feed you a lot of stuff. And some of that stuff is going to be people who, yeah, are preparing to like shoot folks at protests and are filming videos about that and stuff. And that it has this it has this radicalizing effect on a lot of people. And it also has this kind of can have

this kind of radicalizing effect on content where, you know, most political stuff you see isn't kind of that overt, but it does, if somebody has a video where they're being more explicitly political outside of, you know, you know, arguing in favor of gun rights, but if they're getting kind of political in a broader sense, and that does really well, the way that content works is other people might be like, oh, well, folks want me to do a political video, folks want me to talk about, I don't know, Nancy Pelosi or whatever. And that's not just a problem with gun culture or gun YouTube, but it has increasingly become a thing. And in the NRA, kind of very famously, there's a good podcast on how that organization has kind of gone from where it started to where it is that talks

about like NRA TV, but their YouTube channel had some pretty outrageous shit for a while and i i think it left an impact even though it failed initially eventually well the nra is a total we can get into that later the nra has changed so much since its origins to what it is now it's not even the people that found it wouldn't recognize it i don't think at all but um you're touching on a topic there that's also near and dear and i'm not trying to promote in range here that's just we're having a conversation but years ago i decided to proactively demonetize i turned off my adsense and i take no money from any views so it's not like advertising doesn't drive what i do and i feel like the reason i did that was partially just

fuck you youtube it was the hacker manifesto of you come watch my content i cost you money versus make you money which is kind of a statement on my part. But additionally, I do feel like whether it's firearms or any other content that is completely advertiser supported, there is a dangerous thing there in that you have to pursue the clicks like a heroin addict and the clicks make you the money. And therefore you're going to make the stuff that's going to make the clicks

because that's how you make your income. And even if you don't want it to, it can affect you. Yeah. And I'm curious, like, how do you kind of how do you how do you how do you approach sort of dealing in this space where it is so easy for things to become politicized? Like, do you, is that, is that a kind of thing that you have to be consciously sort of picking your battles, I guess? I'm just kind of interested in how you, because you definitely have been more open about having kind of more on the left libertarian side of things, politics, than a lot of people talk about in that space. How do you decide kind of what is worth inserting and what is worth

kind of just, you know, no one needs to hear that within this context? Oh, yeah. I don't think that that's an easy thing to answer, right? It's hard. Like there's a lot of landmines. But when introspectively for me, the answer for me at least was I'm just going to come to this content as my honest self. Like if I'm just going to produce what I want to produce, and since I don't have to worry about advertising dollars, I'm just going to make the shit I want to make. And as a result, I guess it's sometimes considered an alternative voice, but I don't think it really is. I think that the loudmouths have made it sound like there's only one voice in this community, but there isn't. And so by

just being legitimate and honest and being me, there's turned out to be a lot of groundswell, if you want to use grassroots type people out there that want to hear something that's not just evangelical American Taliban. So, but in terms of where to put your foot on what landmine, I guess for me, my decision has been to do topics that have been intentionally ignored that shouldn't have been. Like I've done a bunch of videos

about the confluence of civil rights and firearms ownership, which there's a lot of it. And it's really amazing how much there is and no one talks about it. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we've chatted about that a little bit in some of our episodes. It was like 1919 when there were all those

like race riots around the country, or even if you're looking at like the post-construction period, there's a history both of like gun control being used for racist purposes, but also just of communities arming themselves, black communities arming themselves that is woefully undertold. Although it is, people are starting to deal with it more, thankfully. I'm kind of interested in talking to you about sort of the culture jamming aspect of we have this huge gun culture, aspects of it are very toxic and becoming politicized in a way that is aggressive. How do we have a positive influence and kind of hopefully pull

things back? Because I do think within kind of the issue of gun rights there's more actually more possibility for people to sort of come together and reach an accord than there is on something like abortion um and i i think a lot of that conversation is going to start in spaces like the one you inhabit yeah no i yeah i like what you said culture jamming because another term i've heard is subversive. Well, that's not the intent. But like you mentioned the Red Summer of 1919. And I talked to a lot of people that are really historically interested and minded. And I was astonished how many people had not even heard of it, never mind the explicit realities of it.

And so when it comes to the culture jamming thing, there's one video I did about two of the events of Red Summer of 1919, one of them here in Bisbee locally. And it's an interesting problem to someone who normally would be considered a very standard issue firearms content creator. It turned into the local police attempting to disarm the 10th Cavalry soldiers who are off, you know, military soldiers in Bisbee on recreation. And so you've got this interesting cognitive dissonance. Do I support the cops that a lot of firearms people are like just blindly support? Or do I support the military, which a lot of firearms people blindly support when both of them converge and the, and it's a racist agenda in it. That poses a question that I like to do with like this kind of content, because it means that the viewer has to really, if they get through the video, have to introspectively go, holy fuck, which do I support or do I support either? Or is there a problem here? I haven't been considering. I think

asking questions like that really matters. When you try to like start these conversations with people who are kind of in the same space, but not, you know, I haven't considered talking about this stuff before or on what would traditionally be seen as kind of very opposed political wing. How do you kind of start these conversations in a way that makes it most likely that you're going to be able to have a positive dialogue that actually moves forward as opposed to kind of getting bogged down in the in the things that cause people to just kind of lock horns generally when you we start getting into these areas yeah you know i don't know it's totally possible you're going to have that problem no matter what right i'm sure you see that with you see that with your work for sure absolutely yeah when you take an honest

approach to history and just be like here's the facts um there's going to be people that are just going to be completely resistant to that they're're not going to take it. But I think the best way to do that is to just be that honest approach to it. Like one of the things that I think we do with firearms content, gear is cool. Tech is cool. Guns are neat. They're fun. I enjoy shooting with guns. I like the sport of it. I like going to competitions. But one of the things that gets left out of the conversation a lot is what are the implications of firearms and the sociological economic environments that we live in? And I think that's one of the things that doesn't get talked about. And so if we talk about it fairly and also tend to, I think it's hard to do, but have people from all sides of this perspective, as long as they're not completely dangerous and toxic being part of the conversation we can have a better middle ground that's the hard part like so being inclusive ironically even of views that you aren't necessarily your own as long as the

person you're dealing with isn't my line is if you're actively supporting bigotry or the the harm of other people there's a no-go we We're done. But if we have different views, but we realize that that's not the intent, then we should have a conversation. I think that that's a big difference. Now, I think one of the areas in which this can get murkiest is when you are talking to people, and I've had a few of these conversations, who are convinced that they're kind of on the precipice of a violent conflict sparked by someone coming to take their guns, right? And, you know, there's the version of this that is like, I'm worried that the ATF is going to do some fuckery and a bunch of my shit's going to be illegal,

which is pretty reasonable. And then there's the, I'm worried Antifa is going to come to my small town and take my, you know, guns or do whatever. you know guns or do whatever like because there are often people in that who are just kind of tragically misinformed and radicalized in a way that they're not so much uh eager to harm people as they are just like broken and frightened because of the things that have been fed to them um do you have any kind of best practices when it comes to sort of approaching those conversations and trying to improve the information those people are getting? I guess for me in that regard, when I see people like that, and I think all of us have those people in our world, whether it's your aunt or your uncle or a friend, right? Like we've seen that over the last couple of years for sure.

I think the best thing you can do there for me, and again, I'm just talking to my approach is uh break the echo chamber if you can and so the echo chamber is the problem when we suck from the fire hose of only one source like non-stop yeah that's going to be dangerous that's the kind of stuff that pollutes your mind to the point where you can't think outside of that box so like being more inclusive and like that word is kind of a trigger word a catchphrase but being legitimately more inclusive and presenting a lot of different diversity that really is part of the firearms community can, in some circumstances, break the echo chamber. I'm really happy with this one project on the channel where I'm working with Annette Evans about specifically a female or woman's approach to self-defense with firearms.

And you don't really see that. You'll see channels that are only for women, and you'll like all the majority of gun channels that are only for gun fascinated dudes but like throwing that into the mix there's going to be some subset of people that will click in and watch it out of that g-wiz level and that kind of stuff can break a paradigm in terms of well i never thought of that or never looked at it from that perspective and that's at least that's what i think is the right answer is do your best to make sure you're approachable and try to break the echo chamber. Yeah, that makes complete, yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. I think the other side of this is also worth talking about, because we've kind of been focused

on how do you break the echo chamber? How do you get people who are, you know, in the gun culture on the right to be more open-minded? The other side of this is you have a lot of people who are you know in the gun culture on the right to be more open-minded the other side of this is you have a lot of people who are kind of liberals um or on the left who have a really reflexively negative um opinion to the reaction to the the very idea of gun ownership or gun rights and have these you know you will generally see there's there's a mix of people who can come to it from a very reasonable and argued point in a mix of people who can come to it from a very reasonable and argued point and a mix of people who are just going to like, in the same way that folks on the right do, throw out a handful of quotes that they've seen on memes that they can use to kind

of, you know, shut down debate. How do you, do you have a lot of those conversations where you're kind of trying to make people at least more open to, because this is something my work has dealt with a lot, is kind of trying to sit down to like, I get why you don't think these things should be illegal. Obviously, I see the same mass shooting news that you do. There's a problem, a deep problem with guns in this country. I don't deny that. But like, let's also talk about the idea that the state should have an absolute monopoly on the ability to do violence. Let's talk about the ability of marginalized groups to defend themselves. Let's talk about the history of gun control and how it like it is. It is. There's a lot of conversations that kind of get wrapped up in that. I'm wondering, do you have thoughts in

terms of like how to kind of broach those and progressive avenues to go down to when you're having that side of the conversation? You know, it's totally interesting. I think I feel like I'm curious what you think about this from your work as well i feel like over the last for good reasons over the last couple years more than a couple years i think i've seen maybe it's just my own echo chamber i've seen a lot of people on that side of the political spectrum coming more and more around to being pro-gun yeah i mean then the statistics back that up support yeah and so in the united states is the lowest it's been in quite a while it's that like if there's that joke on that side of the political fence but you go far enough left you get your guns back right um so um but i think

there's been a real wake-up call for a lot of people that used to be very much vehemently against the idea with some of the stuff they saw and went, whoa, these aren't going away. And if you're willing to have a rational thought about, at least in this country, the reality of firearms ownership, whether you like it or not, it's not debatable. This is real. It's what it is. They could ban everything tomorrow, and there's going to be AR-15s in this country for the next 100 years. So that ain't going to change. So with that realization, maybe the better idea with

which i think is with all technology is instead of being afraid of it is to actually learn about it and understand it whether you want it or not it's up to you but like learning and understanding it is at least a step further forward than just complete abject fear yeah that that is often kind of where i start the conversation with just like we have to deal with the reality as it is on the ground, which is that there's 400 million firearms in private hands here, which is not all that far from half of all of the guns in the world. So any sort of like plan you have, it's the kind of like one of the things that often comes up in those conversations is Australia and people say we're like, well, they were able to do it after. Now, Port Arthur was Scotland. I forget the name of the massacre. But there was a massacre in Australia that they banned most kinds of firearms after and confiscated them. And it gets brought up a lot. We're like, well, they did this in the short frame of time and there was this impact on gun violence deaths. Why couldn't we do it and the reason is that they had to confiscate a total of 200 000 arms and there's 400 million guns in private hands in the united states um it's it's a different scale of problem

and that's before we get into sort of the legal barriers because australia didn't have a second amendment obviously like whether or not you like it firearms have a level of protection that is equivalent to the protection free speech enjoys in this country. And you can't just pretend that's not the case. There's a tremendous body of jurisprudence around it. Yeah, no, totally. And like, so that's part of it is the reality there. Australia and here is a completely different beast, as well as culturally. Like the people that were into guns there, and I don't mean to offend any Australians

listening, but it wasn't like here, like in a place like Arizona, like a place like Arizona, guns are just just if you're in arizona they're just intrinsically part of life whether like they're just constant they're everywhere you go to like you see them open carry you not always do she open carry either sometimes it's like reasonable open carry sometimes you see the other side of it but they're just everywhere it's just part of the deal and it's like a lot of that in a lot of the country. And so I actually think that that fear-based ignorance of them is more dangerous because then we don't teach people what to do around them or how to be safe around them. Kind of like abstinence, like education and school teach people not to have sex.

That's fucking dumb. That ain't going to work. And guns exist in this country. Just be afraid of them. That don't work either. So in that regard i think that the um reality is it's much better to um to approach this what i think i guess the way i try to deal with that is if you don't fetishize them people that are more afraid of them are less likely

to just click away if you talk about them like this is a thing here's what they are they're not a totem against evil they They're just a tool. And here's a historical story or narrative or sociological impact of this that's not fetishizing it as some religious item. I think that that helps break that barrier a little bit. And I think that that does bring me to something I think about a lot, which is the how we are in. And actually has, I think, gotten a bit better than it was prior to Sandy Hook. But the very sorry state in a lot of cases of advertising of gear and guns. I think the most famous example was a, I believe it was a Bushmaster ad that got pulled after Sandy Hook that was like an AR-15 that came with a man card that you would get like with your gun.

Get your man card back, I think it's. Yeah, get your man card back. Your man card has been reissued because you have this gun here. And that – I've seen a lot of different gun cultures because it's actually like – we've just talked about how unique US gun culture is. But a lot of people actually own firearms around the world. There's a lot of – even like in Europe. Like France has a very significant gun culture. And in Germany, you'd be surprised.

Like people can own a lot of the same weapons you can here. There's a lot more hoops to jump through to get access to them. But there's still, like, there's gun cultures all around, and especially places like Iraq and Syria. It was really going to, when I saw kind of the gun culture that I most wanted to port some things over to here from there, it was in northeast Syria, in Rojava, where like damn near every, not every individual, but every like family had an AK. Because in part, there was this understanding that you have a duty from time to time to like patrol and watch your neighborhood and not in sort of this like, I'm going to set up a checkpoint for Antifa, but in

a like, hey, ISIS just carried out a big attack. Let's get some folks out into the streets to like watch our neighborhoods, because that's just the reality of the world. And we don't do – we don't just have like a group of militarized police rolling around every neighborhood. Like we also are responsible for protecting our communities. And so we train with weapons. And there was a lot of conversations I had with women about like, well, the fact that I have this and know how to use it now means that things can't be done to me that were before because I have an AK-47 and that means something. I would like to port the kind of like what you were talking about, not just seeing it

as a tool, but seeing it as a tool with societal responsibilities. You don't just have a gun so you can hole up in your house in the zombie apocalypse. You have a gun because you're part of a community and because there's some value that we see in members of the community being armed and not just the state. Yeah, no, totally. So, I mean, that kind of goes way back to the old, like, now sort of silly sounding thing, but like God made man, cult made them equal, right? but like God made man cult made them equal. Right. So before that, like if you were a frail human being for whatever reasons,

um, you really were sort of defenseless, especially in a places like the frontier, but skill at arms could change that. And, um, and that it puts, it can put a more balanced power infrastructure in place.

Um, not that I want to live in a world where we're always like at this point of, mutually assured destruction, but it is much better to have more power balanced than power imbalanced. And firearms absolutely provide that in trained, responsible, educated hands. And that's what I think the story should be, right? That's the emphasis. Like when the whole thing went down in Iraq, like you're describing, I think it was ironic.

One of the things that the U.S. military did was allowed every home to to have an ak like because you get to keep one gun and it's one of these and uh and you talked about gun ownership worldwide like um once you jump through some of the hurdles in some of these countries it's actually easier to own certain things than you can like like a machine gun for example yeah like a machine gun in the u.s is highly regulated since 1934 and pretty difficult and highly expensive because of a specially closed market. But like Bloke on the Range, one of the guys I work with on YouTube, once he gets his permit, he's like, I'm just going to go buy a fully automatic Sten. And he just does. And it's not at an exorbitant price like it would be in the United States. So it's not apples to apples. These controls, whether we like them or not. Some of them are actually more liberal than we have in the United States. Yeah, I think a good example of that and an example of where like a lot of folks who might kind of reflexively think this is insane, but like it's silencers, you know, suppressors being the more accurate term. But silencer is what you call them. It's the thing you see James Bond screw on the end of his gun to make it quiet. and screw on the end of his gun to make it quiet.

And there's like this attitude that they should be heavily restricted because there's this misnomer that for the most part, they make things sound like stuff in James Bond. Now, there are some ways to get a firearm that is incredibly quiet, particularly using like a smaller round and subsonic ammunition. There are some weapons you can effectively make quiet enough

that people won't notice it. But when you're putting a silencer on an AR-15, it is not quiet. No one will miss it firing. But what it won't do if you have to defend yourself in your home is shatter your eardrums forever, right? Or, and this is honestly the bigger case for suppressors, if you are hunting with an animal, as a lot of people do with your dogs, you can have a suppressor on your shotgun as you're bird or whatever and you will not destroy that dog's ears um you know it's the same thing

like i'm hunting for deer you know it's it's it's easier um it's like less dangerous for you potentially like i one thing you notice if you've spent a lot of time around hunting dogs they don't have good hearing by the time they get older because they're hunting dogs you know it's funny suppressors like everything that's that's more controlled it's got a allure of magic around it right like oh a suppressor a silencer or or for that matter a machine gun and like therefore it is the forbidden fruit and everyone wants it more than they ever would have once you own i have one transferable machine guns with tax stamps the whole nine yards yeah and i shoot it like once a year because you shoot it and then you're like wow that was expensive and yeah it was 150 bucks and it's like

oh wee that was fun and then you put it away and the truth is the semi-automatic stuff is far more interesting and actually generally more effective once you use full auto fire it's got very limited use um fully there there i mean there is like if we again are being complete there's one mass shooting i can think of where a fully automatic weapon made the shooter more dangerous, and it was the Las Vegas shooting. Because he was in a set fixed position, he was holed up, and he was not like moving and standing. He was like braced while firing into a crowd from a building. crowd from a building. As a general rule, if you're talking about like what's someone going to be more dangerous with if they're somebody who decides to shoot up something, it's a semi-automatic weapon because an automatic weapon, number one, going to jam more often requires a bit more

understanding and know-how on behalf of the user and also is a lot harder to hit with and will run out of ammunition very quickly as opposed to a semi-automatic AR-15. The reason they are so often used in mass shootings is it's kind of the best weapon to use for that. If that's the thing you're going to do. It's also prolific, right? There's like a zillion of them. Yeah, and it's so easy and available. AR-15s are cordwood in this country.

You can, like, they're literally everywhere. The Las Vegas shooter, though, I don't know that he had actually any truly select-fire guns, weren't they mostly bump stocks? Yeah, he was using a bump stock. I think it's close enough to, yeah. Well, no, it's a good analog, but it is interesting to note, and that guy, what's interesting about that guy is um well of course his act was horrific

and evil obviously yeah he used a bunch of ar-15s with like shitty bump stocks and he had planned something like this for years apparently yeah and he had tannerite in the setup too which is yeah no one knows i mean as we know no one currently i don't know anyone knows what his motivation was at least it hasn't been released but he had been planning something like this for a very long time and what's ironic about that is that if he had bided his time he could have actually had a real select fire like belt fed machine gun he just didn't millionaire yeah he could have done that and uh um this is could it but he just went with this bump stock kind of garbage which is weird um that's a whole nother topic but it isn't yeah but and it is like that is one of those

cases when you talk to people on the right where it's like after that shooting um donald trump and his administration banned bump stocks um which is more gun control than we got out of eight years of obama that's like you know oh boy you out of eight years of Obama. Like, you know, oh boy, you point that out, at least on the federal level, you know, in fact,

um, uh, there's always this narrative that, you know, this political party will take your guns and this polarity party vault. But the truth is statistically and historically speaking, both tend to err on the side of trying to add more restrictions over time. Like if you do it over time,

like Obama didn't, in fact, Obama opened things up. I think he liberalized, uh, to add more restrictions over time like if you do it over time like obama didn't in fact obama opened things up i think he liberalized uh concealed carry of pistol or firearms in national parks yeah he actually made guns a little easier to deal with um but then via essentially executive order edict you got trump banning bump stocks which whether you like bump stocks or not i think the way that went down is questionable legally speaking but that's another topic it and and obviously the bump stocks were also somewhat questionable they were speaking yeah right right totally totally but yeah but that sets an

interesting precedent with what he did with just like fiat edict um but that that said like historically over time there's always been more restrictions not less from both sides and when you point that, the people that just kind of drink the Kool-Aid from one side or the other want to just immediately knee jerk on you. And you're like, no, this is weird. This is coming from all directions, really. Yeah. And I think it is it is a big part of it is just that, like, as a general rule, people who are rich and powerful do not want poor people to be armed. It doesn't tend to work out in their favor. The only time they want poor people armed is when they send them to a war they decided to have. Yeah.

And obviously the history of gun controls would have laid tied to racism. Yep. And the Black Panthers and a whole bunch of stuff around California's gun laws being started to curb black people from owning firearms. And so it would be we would be i mean you could argue in some ways that reagan had a big role in inventing our modern concepts of like what gun control means and what kind of gun control laws like liberal states tend to go after absolutely on open carrying bans on you know concealed carrying of arms that kind of stuff yeah it's deeper than this there's always nuance to obviously really hard right but like

um like california which is kind of one of the flagship states of gun control, and I think that their methods are bizarre to me and almost not understandable. But like you talk about Reagan, pretty much they were like, guns are cool. And then the Panthers walked around with some guns. They're like, whoa, fucking scary. We better do something. walked around with some guns are like, whoa, fucking scary. We better do something. And of course, the image of the Panthers with their guns out walking down the street, which was their legal right. Yeah, absolutely. And it was rad. And it motivated, of course, a lot of things in California, which now we see where that

has led in California gun control laws, has also changed the narrative for so many people that are unwilling to look at things from a truly broad historical perspective. That's only one tiny thing the Black Panthers did. And the rest of their actions are so lost to just the pictures of them standing around with M1 carbines. And that's another example of leaving out like the sin of omission. We'll talk about one thing, but not the rest. And therefore, the historical narrative is only one thing. We'll talk about one thing, but not the rest.

And therefore, the historical narrative is only one thing. And it is also, there's a lesson in that for people who are on the left and who are advocates of gun ownership about what happens in terms of media and in terms of how your movement is thought about and remembered when guns are a part of it. Because that's always going to, for a variety of reasons, and we can say a lot of those are very unreasonable reasons. to for a variety of reasons, and we can say a lot of those are very unreasonable reasons. But if you are a political group who is armed and makes that a visible part of your activism, that is going to really dominate a lot of conversations.

It doesn't mean you shouldn't be, but it means you have to go into that understanding that like that's just how it works in this country. Yeah, you will immediately get, you will immediately from at least some part of the perspective, whatever, whatever side you're on, you will immediately get someone slinging extremist militant at you. Yeah. But by the way, I mean, those are real things too. There are those, I'm not saying there aren't extremists. Well, sure. Yeah. We talk about them all the time. Yeah. This country is full of them as is the world. So that's not, that's not an unreasonable thing that does exist. But the minute you go ahead and stand with that gun, you're going to get that label, whether it's truly something you earned or not there's a very deep conversation that we've talked

about you know we've had it in in pieces on this program and other shows that we've done on cool zone about like when makes sense to be openly armed and when makes sense to be openly armed as part of a group because that is um a very fraught question as like the the what happened in the chas in 2020 uh made abundantly clear but in you know a bunch of cases you know kyle rittenhouse and whatnot there's a ton of different reasons why choosing to be openly armed um there's a debate to be had about like how that influences everyone around you how how that influences the demonstration. And I've seen and heard it used in good ways and in irresponsible ways. I've seen people carrying guns at political events in order to intimidate others.

I've also seen people carrying guns at political events to create essentially a buffer where it's like, OK, there's going to be people fighting at this event. There's going to be clashes. If we're standing here as a group with guns, there's a place people can run back to and the fighting won't continue because nobody wants to push that. And that's without talking about specifics of intent, any of those situations you already talked about, because I can't, but I think, I think it does. Like I, it always comes back to this thing of intent, right? So to me, um, you're right for the firearm. Absolutely true. Regardless, like, even if I disagree with you, this is a right. Like we said, it's protected like the First Amendment.

It's the second. But I think the problem starts to come when you've decided to bring the firearm solely for the intended purpose of intimidation. Like, that's where I start getting like, this is troubling, right? But if you're bringing it for personal defense or community defense, or there's a need because your community is really at risk. I mean, one of the examples of a civil rights one was, this is, someday I'll do a video about this. A community knew that the Klan was coming to intimidate them. And they armed up with surplus M1 Garands and steel pot helmets, literally dug fighting positions and fought them off. The Klan ran for their lives no

one was killed but they literally used m1 garands to uh to stop the clan from infiltrating their community um that was not used as a weapon of intimidation it was used as a weapon of community defense i think that's intent goes everywhere yeah that's fucking dope too too. And yeah, I think one thing that kind of, I think there's a conversation that needs to be had when we start talking about when is reasonable and what situations are reasonable to carry a gun open or concealed. About also what should be carried. carry a gun open or concealed about also what should be carried um i've certainly seen because i don't i think that the most harmful thing is certainly people carrying a gun to intimidate i've also seen people carry guns as a fashion statement which is not the same thing but is bad for example people on the left people at a protest bringing a loaded mosin um to because it was the gun the communists use which is like, you don't,

you don't want to be in a firefight in a dense urban environment with a Mosin Nagant. Did you bring your rubber mallet to beat the bolt open when it gets stuck? I mean, yeah. Like, yeah, it is a gun that doesn't function without a sizable hammer, you know,

not generally speaking. Yeah. And of course people on like, I remember outside of this anti-mask rally, these two guys who were up and carrying ARs, one of whom had an AR-10 with a 100-round drum, was talking about how he had like 400-something rounds on him. And it was like – in case stuff pops off. And it's like what are you – number one, like if you're talking like that, you've spent no time thinking about what actually happens in the situations in public areas in which gunfights occur, because none of them that have happened in any time in the recent future have involved people needing to get 400 rounds of ammunition or drum magazines or whatever.

Like you are not in Fallujah. You are in Salem, Oregon. The extent to which a firearm can be useful for uh self-defense and that does not like bragging about the number of bullets you have is just like weird and gross you know this is going to come off maybe a little strange or even counterintuitive but when i hear someone like that of what you just described in that particular person first of all that gun's barrel would burst in 400 rounds but that's a whole nother topic probably but that said um when i hear that i almost have like um it's kind of sad because the

reason that's sad is that person is doing that one because they've been sold the idea that the firearms talisman like that to me that person's acting like that's a talisman secondarily the reason they have 400 rounds is because they've been sold a pretty big bill of fear and that's that's sad for anyone to live a life based on fear yeah yeah i would agree with that entirely um do you have anything else you wanted to get into in this uh this conversation well i don't know i mean we're just here to talk about like community i just i i i think one thing that's really important and it's something that um is is is a positive and i'm happy to see this is that it was kind of a happy accident with my work. I

didn't even think about it. It just sort of happened. But this is a much, the people that love, first of all, just the sport, there's a lot of us. There's a lot of us of all spectrums across the board. People that believe in the right from the purposes of personal defense and community defense, they're across the board board and i think that one of the things that we need to do is not let the narrative be only one which is we see so much of um uh very much just like right wing i'm going to usually say christian white males like completely dominating this conversation as though and they think they owe as a result own the space now it in their interest, too, from the perspective of preserving firearms rights to be inclusive and have everyone that believes in that particular thing work together to make sure we don't lose a right because a right on exercise is lost, right? agree on firearms rights, we have an agreement there. And that makes us somehow, interestingly,

in the same space. We have something in common versus something diversive. And I think that part of the conversation, at least within reason, I mean, there are people that are legitimately dangerous. You don't negotiate with them. But within reason, agreeing on that topic means, well, we got something in common here. There's probably other things too. And maybe that could be a place where we kind of try to make that conversation better, not worse. And so by being more open, inclusive and saying, hey, there's people here and people there and here we are all together doing this together. Perhaps conversation can be had that's better than what we've been having. Maybe it can be actually a community builder versus a community destroyer. Yeah. Yeah, I would like to see that. Well, I think that's as good a note as any to close out on. Carl if you like it, cool. Come check it out all over the place. YouTube, BitChute, decentralized video contradistributions, another thing I believe in strongly. The corporate oligarchy. But yeah, come out.

If you want to have a little bit different take on firearm stuff or you're interested in the confluence of civil rights and guns and stuff, come check out InRangeTV. I'd appreciate it. I always appreciate new viewers, and thanks for checking it out. Awesome. Alright. Yeah, check out InRangeTV and check us out somewhere. We won't tell you where, but

you can find us if you keep us in your hearts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. and that if I keep doing them, everyone's going to expect that I do a real introduction every time instead of randomly yelling something. So yeah, welcome to It Could Happen Here. I am trying to make my job function as it should and not professionalize it. And this is a podcast about things that are bad, but it's also occasionally a podcast about things that are good and how, in fact, there can be a society beyond this one. And to talk about some of the shades of what that could look like.

I have with me the co-host of the general intellect unit, Kyle and June, which is a, it's a podcast on the emancipation network. That is, I would have told this is the tagline, the podcast of the cybernetic Marxists. I am,

I am very excited. Yeah. It's really exciting to be here. Absolutely. Thank you for coming on. Yeah, I guess, okay, we should start at the very, very beginning, because I don't think most people know any of this. What is cybernetics? Right. know any of this uh what is cybernetics right um so cybernetics uh is i guess a term that comes from uh what is it the kybernetis right uh steering uh the idea of steering a boat um So using your or to navigate the waters. And so essentially it is a science of control.

And that sounds really scary. between the steersperson, the oar, the boat, their body, and the water around them. And getting all of those things in sync in such a way that the steersperson is going where they want to go, the boat doesn't capsize, and they don't lose the oar um and so that's what control means it's a kind of balancing a kind of uh connection between the organism and the environment in such a way that it can survive and thrive. And that's what Cybernetics is focused on. Yeah, the thing I love about the Steersman metaphor is that it's all about... It's controlling the sense of regulation,

but also, very importantly in Cybernetics, it's almost always self-regulation. Because one of the core principles... Again, because the term usually calls to mind this Terminator, cyber-gothic kind of domination, and it's actually not what the field is about at all. Because one of the core insights of cybernetics is actually that any given system, the only thing that can really control it is itself, because of the sheer complexity of systems.

So that, like, the kind of, like, top-down external domination of an organism that we all fear is kind of, like, actually, if you look at the cybernetics literature, that's not actually really possible, because the external controller would never have enough complexity to match what the organism is capable of. And, you know, organisms are self-regulating systems. The steersman with his boat is a self-regulating system that, like, regulates its upright position in the water and regulates its course that's directed towards its goal. So that's why it's so important i think that's why we think it's so important for um the left and like people who are concerned with these like you know visions of and uh politics of autonomy and liberation they really need to look at this stuff because it turns out there kind of is a science of like autonomous self-guiding um organic systems you know so yeah no terminator here yes uh yeah i mean you know when you see

uh scary videos of militarized robots and they are learning to you know jump and fire weapons and all that kind of stuff there certainly is cybernetics involved there but that is that kind of stuff. There certainly is cybernetics involved there, but that is a kind of domain application of cybernetics rather than defining what cybernetics is. It's really kind of holistic systems thinking in general is what cybernetics is. Yeah. Yeah, that's probably worth emphasizing, right?

That like cybernetics in some ways is kind of like out of fashion these days like it kind of evolved into systems thinking and like um i guess a lot of its lessons got kind of absorbed in general but we find there's great value in going back to them the kind of originators and like focusing on that field um it's like we on the show we got into the cybernetics angle by reading uh andrew pickering and his book the cybernetic brain in which um he kind of acknowledged that like there's he kind of split it into two like there's american cybernetics like which had that kind of like um dour kind of military domination sort of flavor to it that like

it's kind of an earned reputation there but Pickering was more concerned with like British cybernetics and it's like a lot of British thinkers that and it had a very different flavor there where it was more open-ended it was kind of had more of a focus on kind of liberation and like politics and stuff in fact some of those like Gray Walter was um like explicitly an anarchist and like wrote in anarchist um like journals and stuff like that. And for him, those two things went hand in glove, right? That liberatory politics as a politics of human flourishing, human beings as autonomous units flourishing in their own contexts, and of social

systems that would enable that kind of flourishing. To him, that was just hand-in-glove with cybernetics, there was no real distinction there. It was just like, yeah, these two things fit each other perfectly. Which you lose later with general systems theory sort of stuff. There's plenty, I don't know, who am I thinking of here? The Talib, that guy with the black swans sort of stuff. He's big into systems stuff, but isn't so much into the liberatory politics, I guess. A lot of that angle is kind of lost. Yeah, and I think this is sort of a product of, I guess, the broader ideological course that's going on

while Cybernetics comes in and out of fashion. I think we should go back a bit to the beginning to sort of situate this because i know like when i like before i like ever did any reading on cybernetics like my immediate assumption was that it was it was you know this this is a thing that was entirely just based off of computers right that this is like this is and that's not really true from my understanding of it so can we go back and sort of like talk about where this came from a bit and how it sort of moves over this is over sort of the 60s 70s and yeah go from there yeah yeah i think you can kind of trace it back in its sort of European origins to, you could probably say, Hegel.

understanding being not just a substance but a subject, I think is a move towards a kind of cybernetic understanding where you understand the whole system as a holistic entity as opposed to just an individual interacting with an external environment. individual interacting with an external environment um and uh you can also see this come up in say uh there was a ecologist uh uexkill in the german ecologist in the early 20th century i believe who was trying to understand you know the organism in its environment. The sort of precursors to ecology can be seen as precursors to cybernetics. And then when you get to the kind of development of cybernetics as a science or as a discipline in in the mid 20th century it's not exactly about computing it's um it's more about uh balancing a machine with its environment so um the sort of prototypical machine of this kind was the servo mechanism, which was used to help guide an anti-aircraft gun in shooting down enemy aircraft.

So making sure it tracks properly with the target and doesn't lose the target and is assisting the operator in operating the gun instead of just being a inanimate object that has trouble tracking what a very fast moving target. I mean, you can even think back to like the, you know, in World War One when they discovered, hey, we could actually like synchronize the timing of the propeller and the timing of our gun on the front of this plane so that our guns aren't destroying our propellers and shoot and we're shooting our own planes down with our guns when we're dog fighting right like it's uh yeah that's a systems understanding right so that's um that's

that's norbert wiener right and working on the um automated gun turret stuff and that's he's coins the term cybernetics to like um give a name to the thing he was starting to discover and it's like he was kind of pulling together a bunch of threads there and like one of those kind of important insights is that like um like they couldn't get an improvement in like targeting and accuracy without like basically making the gun turret an agent of its own that like and the like the turret and the gunner would be cooperative agents that in combination would um achieve their goal but like there was there's something strange and spooky about that i think that um this sort of feedback mechanism inside the turret gives it a sort of weird agency that

combines with the agency of the gunner to like guide the whole system towards a goal um yes and what it ends up becoming then is a kind of boundary space where the distinction between human and machine uh starts to become ambiguous because they both start to possess they're both understood to have a kind of agency they're both understood to have kinds of like functions and then you kind of get this sort of like a human machine interface idea and you can start to bring in all of these different ideas from like anthropology from physiology from uh math from ecology uh and they all start to interact in this domain of cybernetics. And the core idea that kind of ties everything together is that of feedback.

So Wiener realizes that what he needs to achieve this goal is a feedback mechanism that is error-correcting feedback. If the gun is slightly too far to the left, it corrects itself rightwards and so on. But that, as you said, that connects across all sorts of things, right? Like you start to realize that's present everywhere in ecology, in neurology, in like, learning is based on feedback, you know? So it's really funny to read Norbert Wiener, like in the 50s, basically describing what would become machine learning.

He's just like, he just off the cuff is like, yeah, if a machine could, or if any system could just analyze its own performance and then feed back onto itself, it would learn any old pattern you wanted it to. And he's like, yeah. Turns out he was completely correct. And that's where it kind of like gets into, like, you get later thinkers like Ross Ashby, who was, and like other folks like in and around psychiatry, who were like really interested in how the brain worked. And that's the other thing that feeds into like cybernetics is like, it's why Pickering called his book The Cybernetic Brains, because like the brain and like nervous systems show up so much in that field right that like the brain being a kind of learning and adaptation machine attached to the body or whatever and like

yeah I don't know there's something fascinating there and like the I mean there's something kind of possibly troubling in kind of melting down the distinctions between living organisms and machines or whatever mean, there's something kind of possibly troubling and kind of melting down the distinctions between living organisms and machines or whatever. But like, there's also something very compelling in just like recognizing the same patterns happening at all these different levels, right? That like, you get similar behaviors and similar kind of outcomes. And then, you know, it turns out like you can kind of do a science on these things and come up with even better explanatory frameworks based on your observations across many fields. Yes. And so it is, in a sense, about computers, but the computers are really just understood to act like a kind of brain.

to act like a kind of brain and that's connected to a nervous system which is connected to uh you know like actuators of some kind some kinds of like machines that actually do things in the world so it's not about like say computer science specifically it's more about like well computers are a useful way to do cybernetic design because they can act as a control system and they're flexible it's not that this is about computers really yeah yeah absolutely and like that you brought you brought up something very important there that like um in all cases cases of cybernetics, the systems that we're considering are not isolated, like brain-in-a-box kind of things. They're all the things that are directly engaged with the world. So it's not that kind of monadic rationalism of computation just happening in a box somewhere and and perfect intelligence, that kind of stuff. The cyberneticians were always working with systems that were engaged in real-time emergent situations. And because of that, they rapidly acknowledged that

for so many of these important systems, the only way to figure out what it's going to do is to let it do it um because you you can't like pre-compute all the possible outcomes you know of these like very sticky and complex real world situations the um the best way to figure out what it's going to do is to let it do it and watch yes and i think i think that's an interesting sort of like if you look at where a lot of the sort of like techno fetishist like social attempts to sort of like manipulate society technology have gone it's like yeah you get like like blockchain smart contracts it's like the blockchain smart contract is like okay we are going to think of literally everything that could possibly happen and attempt to put it in like a very small amount of code and if anything like literally anything at all happens that i you know that we didn't expect i we're now everyone is now screwed because we have just made this thing immutable and

put it in such a way that we can't change it yeah i think that yeah that's a i think this is a useful sort of i mean corrective just in just just in the way that we've now... Like, we've gone backwards. Like, we've gotten into this place where you, instead of, like, we need to let these systems play out, we need to let them control themselves, we've gotten to, like... We think that we can actually just sort of, like,

you know, turn the entire system into code that we can predict ahead of time and have the basis of some sort of social system off of. Yeah, I mean I think it's something that the cyberneticians and maybe Pickering would describe as a kind of perversity of modern thought, like a

modern mindset, like that kind of rational kind of mindset, right? And to the cyberneticians, that whole thing with the blockchain stuff would be just truly laughable because it's immediately obvious to them that the problem there is like, okay, proposing we're going to use a blockchain to regulate some sort of social process or whatever, smart contracts, whatever. And it's like, that thing has nowhere near the fidelity required to regulate social processes because social processes are unimaginably complex and have just incredible variety there's

um there's a there's like a law that's at the heart of cybernetics called ashby's law of requisite variety and in short it basically states that given a system um the only thing that's really capable of regulating is regulating is itself, because a regulator needs as much variety as the thing it's regulating if it's going to actually succeed at it. And so that's the kind of thing that nudges everyone towards... When you get to someone like Stafford Beer, his whole model of organization pushes a lot of the intelligence downwards to the bottom

layers because they're it's basically the people on the ground on the shop floor are the people who are best informed to actually deal with their own situation and that's that sounds like a banal observation but like it for beer that was actually quite a step forward to like just admit that like trying to like trying to like in his context like, often the organization of a firm, like, or a company. Like, trying to manage a company from the boardroom is just fucking ludicrous. Yeah. Nobody there has enough information to act on.

They're all dumbasses anyway. So for Beer, it was just, like, this is where it starts to get interesting, and it connects to the politics, right, that, like, for one of these scientists just observing reality and, like, you know, using, you know, pretty good sort of intuitions and, like, for one of these scientists just observing reality and, like, you know, using, you know, pretty, pretty good sort of intuitions and, like, scientific frameworks, just looking at it and going, like, oh, it is obviously the case that the best way for society to organize is bottom-up self-organization. And that, like, it's not just a moral point,

it's actually a technical point as well. like um these these top-down bureaucratic kind of micro tyrannies are not only morally objectionable they're also technically inferior to the kind of like cyber communism we want to institute yeah i have like one of one of my one of one of my favorite stories about so i worked as a maintenance worker for a while and one day my boss was like there was some problem with the sink and my boss was like no we don't need the plumbers i can do this and so he goes in there and it's it's like it's like a sink in like a building right so it has just one of those things that there's like a pipe that connects the top of the sink to like the wall and he goes okay here look at this i'm gonna i'm gonna turn this valve and this is gonna turn the water off and what he

instead does is he take he he takes the pipe off of the wall and just like a torrent of water is just now shooting out of this pipe because he has removed the thing yeah he's removed the pipe from the wall it's like this is that you know this is this is why i think like yeah this this this this you know this this is like a particularly funny example of how these sort of top-down management systems, and this guy like used to be a maintenance guy, right? But he just like wasn't a plumber. And so, you know, and he accepts into it, and he's like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, hold on.

I know how this system works. It's going to be fine. And it just, there is a geyser. The geyser of water has so much force. It's like pushing our tool cart across the room it's just it's just gushing it's like a fire hydrant it's coming out of this wall now i wanted to i guess beers is an interesting way to go to go into the sort of the politics of what this actually looks like do you want to talk about and i know i i briefly talked about this in an episode on neoliberalism a while back but do you want to talk about and i know i i briefly talked about this in an episode on

neoliberalism a while back but do you want to go into sort of more detail into what beers was up to and the eventually failed attempt because of military coup to try to implement like a cybernetic system for organizing essentially an economy. Yeah, sure. Um, yeah. So, uh, Stafford beer, uh, was a, um, management consultant. Um, he and a cybernetician, uh, he got his start sort of doing, um, operations research, um, uh, sort of doing operations research, which is kind of a precursor to cybernetics. That is kind of like interested in logistics and organizing systems in the British military in World War II.

In the British military in World War II. And then he came out of that and became were really screwed up with the status quo way of doing business and of organizing things. The way that autocratic power of management creates all kinds of ridiculous problems. The way that managing organizations according to org charts, which are there to assign blame more than anything else, creates all kinds of perversities. The way that organizations fail to adapt to their environments because they get into these kinds of strange neuroses

um and you know just sort of going through all of that and more often than not being unable to intervene in an effective way uh to um address these problems and just sort of like seeing how these little instances of perverse corporate culture are indicative of the broader problems of our society as a whole and of capitalism right um and so you know he had a basis from his time in india during the second world war in uh kind of like tantra uh kind of like you know eastern uh or specifically indian um spirituality yoga all this kind of. So he kind of had a cult countercultural side to his personality. And he was always doing tinkering, strange experiments with cybernetics. He wasn't just the straight laced corporate guy. But it was a combination of that sort of a combination of that sort of countercultural background with his growing frustration with corporate systems that led him to start to develop ideas about how things could be different.

And this kind of meshed up with the thoughts that were happening in Chile during the Chilean revolution in the early 70s. So they reached out to him to come and help out with organizing their economy as they were undergoing this revolutionary process of trying to sort of throw off the shackles of imperialist dependency and create a society that was focused on the flourishing of workers and of society as a whole, as opposed to one that was based on sort of, you know, resource extraction where everything flows to the top. Yeah. Do you want to explain some more about how that went well so um yeah it um it went well and then it went badly i guess um but from from the reading we've done and from our research it seems like if um basically if the if the u.s hadn't sent in the

fascists to to kill them all um this this would have worked like it was working and it was, the project was actually going pretty well. Yeah. Can you explain briefly what, like, I think it becomes, it's called project cyber symbol. What,

what exactly, like, what was it doing? Um, so, um, so like beer's big kind of innovation is, uh,

what we call the viable system model, um, or VSM. And it's a model that's, it's a model for these like autonomous social systems that is kind of taking, it's not, I wouldn't say it's entirely based on like the structure of the human body,

but it's like taking a lot of lessons from biology and neurology and neuroscience and cybernetics and just kind of meshing them all together. So basically like, it's like, if your body is basically a bunch of autonomous organs that all take care of their own business plus a nervous system that synchronizes them and unifies them into a workable whole then you can kind of see the whole system as having this kind of mixture of vertical and horizontal aspects like on the one hand it has this horizontal aspect where the autonomous like system one units

are are well autonomous more or less like the heart takes heart takes care of its own thing the lungs take care of their own thing but then the nervous system meshes them together in layers so that it can say oh hold on too much oxygen dial it down a bit and then the organs respond dynamically to those those signals. So it's kind of like up-down feedback loops, where the lower levels of the system are the smart bits that are doing all the important work, but there's this supporting infrastructure of the nervous system and the brain that unifies the whole thing and keeps it all on the rails. So, and importantly, it's a kind of recursive model. So like a human being is an autonomous unit. And then that it's that unit is composed of more autonomous units,

like the organs and the muscles. And then each of those is composed of cells, which are autonomous units, and then, you know, so on. But like, that ladder goes upwards as well. So that like a team is, is an autonomous unit composed of human beings a firm or like a department is a autonomous unit composed of teams a firm is composed of departments uh like a sector is composed of firms and it's the same kind of structure in at each layer um so the kind of upside there is that like um you don't like you kind of have a fairly un same sort of principles that get applied to sectors in an economy, with the same kind of bottom-up feedback going on as well.

So Stafford was invited to Chile by the Allende government in... So that was like 1970, right? That election happened. So he arrived in late 1970 i think um i mean i'm not 100 certain on the timeline but we're looking at those those first few years of the 70s as as the time when this is happening yeah yeah i and he's elected in 1970 yeah so it's towards the end of that year that he's he's invited and's basically given the task of like, hey, do all this stuff, but with this entire economy. And he's like, yeah, sure, cool.

So he puts together Project Cybersyn. And there's a long story there of them building out this infrastructure. It's all highly experimental and highly tentative. One of the big problems they run into is that they don't have very much in the way of hardware, especially because they're under embargo. What at the time

was a pretty crufty old mainframe that they ran the software on. But step one was installing this huge communications network amongst all the factories and setting up the workers' committees and stuff would feed information into it. And it would kind of, again, this like feedback thing where you kind of take signals

from the economy, uh, integrate them and then go, Oh, you're producing too much steel route. Some of your product over to this, this factory, and it'll be better use there. And then, you know, you guys over there turn up this dial, you turn down this dial. So, and it'll be better use there. And then you guys over there turn up this dial, you turn down this dial. And then if that plan doesn't quite work out, then you've got another layer of feedback tomorrow to say, okay, that plan didn't quite work. Here's an adjusted plan. So it's this both bottom-up and top-down loop of feedback of feedback that's like... I think the phrase Pickering uses is reciprocal adaptation, where the economy

and its firms and its workers are all kind of adapting to each other in real time in a full system. Am I missing anything? No, I mean, that's essentially what Cybersyn was. It was a system designed to largely, I think, at first supplement the market. Although Beer later realizes that, like, actually, if you have a good system of this kind,

you probably don't need a market. Um, uh, but essentially it was like, okay, our economy has been one that has been built around dependence to, uh, you know,

especially the United States. And it's been organized in that way. especially the United States. And it's been organized in that way. And we need to reorganize the economy, both to promote the well-being of the workers, the autonomy of the workers, realize the ideals of socialism in that way, and also to create a system that is less dependent on those existing structures of imperialism.

And so having this reciprocal adaptation, having systems in place to connect things that were previously disconnected, would allow you to move in that way of increasing autonomy and increasing freedom. And that was generally the idea of Cybersyn. Yes. Yeah. And there was something very interesting, like when we were reading the reissue of his book Brain of the Firm, where he has a section at the end that documents this whole experience in Chile. There's a really interesting part where towards the end of it, he's like, and this is like interesting part where towards the end of it he's like and this is like getting up towards the coup where he's like um he and the other cyber sent operatives like and the people are putting this together realize that like the workers and like people in towns are like just on their own just

like using this stuff and these kind of principles to just like abolish the value form basically like yeah but notably without the involvement from above like as in beer and companies stumble upon this just happening where they're like oh my god they're just they're just dismantling the market and it's like it's all just kind of happening and that's there was something really wonderful to that that like it it indicated like there was there really was something to it that like you could like as in people working people could use these tools and this like new way of organizing themselves to just like liquidate market relations and wage relations like spontaneously yeah it's a spontaneity that's that's not really it it does it it's it feels very different from the kind of spontaneity you often get in like the way leftists or like anarchists

talk about it often like the kind of spontaneity is like a magical sort of thing which is like where freedom just arrives from out of nowhere but this this was like installing infrastructure to enable freedom and then it actually kind of happening until the fascists showed up you know yeah what i think is really interesting about it is that so you know you have you have like you have this sort of central control center from which a lot of stuff is being run but you know yeah it's it's it's it's a weird system because it's trying to link together like a lot of different kinds of firms like you have some say you have private firms but you have a lot of you have a lot of state-run firms you also have firms that throughout this whole process people like workers just taking over factories they're setting up these sort of like call them industrial

cordons i think if i'm remembering my spanish rights like yeah they they you know they start setting up their own institutions and it's it's this becomes this way of sort of like networking these groups together and the thing that's, the other thing I think is interesting is, you know, so you have, you have them on the one hand, like just getting rid of markets and going like,

okay, wait, we can just coordinate production through this and like not have markets. And then the second thing they do is it's the, the freedom immediately becomes political in, in the sense that like, yeah, like one of,

one of the things they do, they, they're that that's, that's going on in this period is that, and there's Chile has a very, very very right wing like it's basically like the it's even today it's like it's like really like one of the only like union like huge unions left in chile is truckers unions and those guys are extremely right wing they're in this period of being backed by the cia they're being trained by afl cio as i say like every episode but like yeah and and they're you know

they're intentionally doing strikes try to overthrow the government by blocking production and you know like the workers are like oh okay hold on we can just use this cybernetic system to figure out where these blocks are figure out where materials need to move through and we can just you know we can just stop the kind of revolution we can just sort of like we can we can just we can just fight our way through it and and it's interesting it's like this happens and so then that that like the original plan of using sort of of using these truckers is like this sort of right wing like the first attempt fails and once that fails it's like they have to go to the military yes and the coup eventually works it's it's hard to it's hard to resist a coup outright isn't it um yeah yeah the

thing with this the trucker strike is that like yeah it's you can very well imagine like the cia and stuff going into it thinking oh this is what will do it right this will sew it up but not realizing that the workers actually had in their hands a like vastly more sophisticated system for outmaneuvering them yeah and that system worked like a charm like like clockwork just like and even like you read the accounts from this thing like uh both in eden medina's cybernetic revelationaries and in beer's own account and there's like the sense that it was actually kind of spooky and weird but like even the people involved didn't quite expect it to work out that way. And that, like, they were surprised at how effective it is.

But it gets back to the core of cybernetics and, like, feedback is weirdly effective at getting things done. You know, these, like, highly tuned feedback systems. They give you a lot of power to outmaneuver the scumbags, you know? Yeah, and I think in some sense like this is like people talk a lot about chile as sort of like the sort of foreclosed future of like an electoral democratic socialism but like i don't think that was the potential of the moment the potential of the moment was this and it's interesting to me that well because beers kind of traces out a political history that never quite happened which is so okay one of the one of the sort of big

political trends over the course of 20th century is you have all these people who were sort of like they they basically got turned into planning bureaucrats during during world war ii because every government basically turns into a giant planning engine and then you know some of them go into some of them you know essentially stay on in the government doing planning stuff. Beers goes into the corporate world, and the corporations are also – they also start doing this planning stuff. But Beers is interesting because he pivots in a direction that the world doesn't, which is he pivots towards, the solution to sort of you know the the the kind of like decay of these like authoritarian planning systems whether whether they be like the corporate versions of it or the sort of like state administered uh like total economic planning

from the top down versions is oh well okay we need to have planning from the bottom up and distributed planning yeah yeah and he like everyone involved with cyberson gets murdered uh the only reason beer survives because he wasn't in the country and it's this really interesting like like it's kind of not a story not everybody got murdered but some of them did and some of them were in exile uh some of them were imprisoned yeah it was it was it was you know it was not a good time beer got out early and he knew things that were getting were getting bad and everybody around him knew things were getting bad um yeah like he was on a he was on like a kind of i guess like a almost diplomatic mission to like try and get some of the blockade

stuff like he was trying to i think he was trying to flog like a container ship full of um iron or something you know he was shopping shopping it around to try and try and help out the like in line to the world that's what it was yeah um yeah but um yeah it's um oh and hold on i had a thought there um oh and then like after afterwards um like beer spent a fair bit of his time like trying to get his his comrades out of out of chile and get them out of prison um and got got them resettled in um in the uk and so on and yeah america as well um but yeah i i think that um this is like that's a very interesting point about the the you know the sort of the real value of this moment being that movement towards autonomy that that reorganization of society not towards neoliberal engineering of markets and sort of reinforcement of private dictatorships, but towards a kind of like holistic control system that is still informed by, you know,

the principles of autonomy and science. of autonomy and uh and and and science um it's it's definitely like an answer to the crisis of the 70s which was not taken up and in that sense it is a foreclosed future but of course one that we can take lessons from now yeah i think there's something else that's very interesting to me about this because you know if if you look at how like if you look at how the socialist bloc sort of responds to the crisis of the 70s and their sort of decay in the 80s, like they have a lot better technology than what the Chileans are using. They have more resources. And every single one of them goes no. And instead, just sort of like transitions instead of...

I think it has to do with... There's a line... This is like slightly before this. There's a line in a debate Mao and Zhou Enlai are having having in i think it's 1967 this is like the peak of uh the sort of worker-led part of the cultural revolution like the works have taken shanghai and mao and joe and lai are talking and they're they're trying to figure out

like what are they gonna do you know the they they've set off this force it's now become uncontrollable and there's there's this line where they're talking about okay well if we give if we give them if we give them a commune uh they have to have free elections and joe and lie is like well that would be anarchism and then they're just like oh god we can't do that and they they never do in the end you know the end result of this whole sort of that whole sort of process is that China like instead of doing instead of sort of like devolving

any level of control down to like any of the workers who are doing things they're like okay well we'll just we'll just you know we'll do capitalism instead well we'll you know we'll create markets we'll sort of like maintain our firm structure but you know we'll create markets we'll sort of like maintain our firm structure but you know subject the party cadres into it yeah yeah and it's it's this it's it's a very interesting thing

to me too because like there's been other like you know like there's like lots of socialist parties of sort of various like degrees of radicalness have come to power like since 1973 and to my knowledge not a single one of them has ever picked any of this stuff back up like even even you know like like the most radical sort of like like you know like or like or like early chavez never like touches this like even like i don't like i i don't i don't think like i don't think the ecln's ever done it like i mean they they have technological issues there but like it's it's it's interesting to me that like basically no one who's ever taken power since has ever attempted it again which again is strange because this is you know one of the sort of like this you would

think this is like this is at least a potential solution to sort of this this this this problem of the stagnation and sort of collapse of the old sort of old systems of planning economies but no one takes it up and i'm interested to think what you two think about that like why this doesn't happen yeah there's a i think there's an interesting dimension of beer's work in chile that kind of i think for optimizing the economy. But he had other concerns and other briefs that he was working on at the same time and what he came to realize was that there was a layer of uh management and experts in the organization of the economy that were happy enough to sort of work on a Cybersyn that was designed to improve production numbers, but they had real resistance to the idea of worker autonomy because of wanting to maintain their job privileges

and because of the prejudices of their, their habitus, I guess you could say the, the, what they learned when they were educated as engineers or managers or whatever. And, and,

you know, where the people who know things, the workers don't know things, they shouldn't be in charge, that kind of thing. And so he starts to, he starts to realize that in order to really make Cybersyn effective as an engine for autonomy, what needs to happen is that sort of what you were describing with the Shanghai Commune,

need to learn these cybernetic principles themselves and implement them through autonomous action. And so he starts to try to kind of like write up like write pamphlets that can be distributed to the workers so that the information that he has as theory is not being filtered through a bureaucracy, but is instead like, you know, involved in an educational process of self-mobilization among the workers. And so, you know, this really doesn't mean that expert knowledge power to affect an organization or change an organization. So if the workers are able to change their organizations, they are also managers. That's not something exclusive to experts. For beer, management is a function. It's not a person. In beer's ideal world, management would just be these decision nodes that emerge among workers. A manager would never be a person.

A manager would be a kind of structural information processing thing that happens among people. thing that happens among people um yeah and yeah and so like when you see in for example the ussr the option of creating a planning network a computerized uh telecommunications planning network throughout the whole uh union um it's basically shot down for two reasons. One, it would be very, very expensive for them to develop. It would be on the order of doing their nuclear weapons development, perhaps more expensive than that. And two, it is simply at odds with the system of like planning the command economy that had that had grown up in the wake of the revolution. Right. It's simply at odds with the power of all of the factory managers, the planners, all that kind of stuff, it just kind of makes,

it threatens their identity and it threatens their position of power. And so I think that when you look at the socialist countries and why they didn't adopt this system, I think it's because it would require the people in power to really rethink their entire role and identity as members of society um yeah and then there's there's a kind of there's a dreadful irony really in that like it's it's stafford beer somebody who comes out of like bourgeois like management stuff um and is is deep in the pocket for that. He's the one who actually sincerely pursues the most radical project in socialist history that we've ever seen. Vastly more radical in its intent and the beginnings of its impact than anything any

Leninist has ever done. And it's basically because he actually did want real freedom and autonomy for working people. And your average Londonist just doesn't, you know? Like, again, to go back to the example from earlier, right? When under pressure, they'll do capitalism before they'll do anything that even resembles autonomy for workers. They'll take that path rather than doing the right thing. You know, that does speak to the character of the thing and it's it's it's it's uh it's that class interest basically of those kind

of functionaries right like and the thing that makes beer different is that he sincerely actually wanted to do it you know and the the workers autonomy thing wasn't just a smokescreen for him you know yeah and when when he starts to come up with these ideas of like thinking like, oh, OK, like an economic planning system is not adequate. We need to go beyond that to thinking about the constitution of the social body. He he quickly finds that he's being marginalized within those circles of planners in the Chilean government because this is not something that they are enthusiastic about they're actually quite concerned about this idea even if Allende would be you know all for it right because he he was he was very sincere about his interest in in autonomy um there were still many people around beer who did not particularly like the idea um yeah absolutely and i think if we look at it you know in terms of a why hasn't it happened

since then in in all of these intervening decades i think you also have to look at um also have to look at the international system and the way that countries figure into it. Because we have all of these neoliberal structures of management and organization that were created in the 80s and 90s and early aughts that a socialist government has to contend with if they are to embark on a program like this which isn't to say it's impossible but what it does mean is that there are all these sort of highly complex regulatory and organizational structures that have roots deep in our societies right now. And it is the path of least resistance to not attempt to engage in an effort to kind of, you know, let the market atrophy as you develop an alternative structure for social organization.

Because all of these structures are there and you have to kind of like root them out and replace them with something new as opposed to having all these ready-mades of what's already there. The market-centered solutions, the kind of autocratic solutions, you know, all of the management systems

that have been developed with an autocracy in mind instead of something that is truly democratic and kind of self-gestating. And I think as well, there's a kind of other thing that like um like the the left has been kind of in a very weak position for quite a while now like since the since the 70s right and like um yes like we're we're just we're just starting to come around to maybe being on possibly an upswing. But also, like, I think there was this kind of long depressive phase at the end of the, or at the crossing of the centuries, right,

where a lot of, like, leftists kind of, and this actually gets into, like, why, some of the reasons why we started General Intellect Unit, that, like, we felt like we needed to bring this kind of, like, systems thinking and, like, technical seriousness back to the table after the kind of weird depressive phases where like, you know, like say the ultra globalization stuff or the occupy stuff where people kind

of take an almost explicitly anti-strategic kind of turn and like a kind of anti-technical turn, you know, there's that kind of depressive hangover of like, Oh my God, like capital and its its its technology is hegemonic like how the fuck are we ever going to get out of this like it would have been hard to make an argument for a scientific and like technical kind of fusion with um with

the humanist kind of impulses of socialism but that's i think we're getting to a point where we can start actually having that conversation again like we're we're seeing a bit more of a turn towards that and they can turn towards like this kind of serious kind of like more more serious kind of discussion of like hey like okay like okay like we we we fucking hate the the current order of things we want to we want to see it gotten rid of what would we actually replace it with like functionally how would things actually work like i think those kind of conversations are coming back on the table in a way that those were just impossible in the 90s like after the berlin wall came down or whatever um they were impossible a couple of years ago you know yeah the the the market as the fundament of

society basically seemed to be invincible at that time um and there was a lot of just sort of wrong-headed assumptions about what was and wasn't true about it and about society as a whole and you know we've had a lot of chaos in the years since then that affected not just the countries that were, you know, being restructured by the IMF, but actually came and affected the core of the world economy as well. of the world economy as well uh and i think that that that's sort of like you know in the same way that world war one kind of disproved the idea of the white man's invincibility and superiority like having those like market chaos dynamics come home to roost in the core of the world system uh has has undermined that invincibility, that idea that, oh, the market is just naturally the best and there's nothing that could possibly be better. At the same time that we have all of this technological development that's happening

in our economy that could be used for something different as opposed to, I don't know, making NFTs or something. Yeah, absolutely. That's all super important. I think that kind of refines, like my previous thought is refining in my head now like that, like right now that kind of market chaos and especially even like the chaos of like the system's response to COVID and stuff really puts like in general and for the left in particular, it puts like the question of governance back on the table in a way that it had kind of been off the table for a while. Like, I think there was a, there was a period on the left where

like left activity was kind of like railing against governance. Like it was like, we, we want freedom from governance and that sort of thing. Right. And I'm not going to say those are necessarily bad impulses. Right. But I think they're also kind of a bit wrongheaded as well right but like the kind of reality is that like uh for human life to flourish and for our lives to flourish we need governance and like because like governance actually like as a word has the same root as cybernetics does so kybernetis the greek word becomes kubernetes becomes cybernetics right but that's also the root of governor so kubernetes kubernetes those are the roots of governance so governance and cybernetics are one in the same kind of concept um and this question of like if we intend to create a world

of self-governance um that is effective it's viable in beer's terminology, like viable self-governance, that what we're proposing is opposed to the chaotic vortex of nonsense that we have to put up with right now. And that's back on the table in a big way that like, because I think especially with COVID people look at like just the sheer idiocy and ineptitude and chaos of our governments and realizing like, oh, those are decrepit, completely screwed up systems. And in part because their goal is the maintenance of capital accumulation.

So this gets us back to the goal-directed behavior of cybernetics, right? Like the steersman steers the boat towards a goal, right? And it's always about, or like a cybernetic device like a thermostat has a goal temperature that it's trying to like regulate the temperature of the water towards. You know, we have these governance systems that are completely awful. They're just like not suitable for like the regulation of human life for flourishing.

They're only suitable for the regulation of this insane system that just keeps capital accumulation going. Like that's the control variable that it regulates. And we're now in a position where on the left, more and more of us are saying, what we're proposing is not a sort of magical escape from governance. We're proposing really, you know, we should have sane governance. And it turns out that sane governance is bottom-up, self-organized governance.

And that's both a moral position and a technical position and i think they're both of those the moral and technical valences uh feed off each other like we're we're able to be the serious people in the room this this is a very big change of pace right for us because like for a while we were railing against like the very serious people of like the centrists and like the fucking blairites and the the clintonite sort of people we're the serious people now saying what what this what this system actually does is absurd and ludicrous and it needs to be dismantled and rebuilt with a totally different like feedback circuit a different kind of goal orientation um and it needs to be oriented towards human flourishing

and like that's turns out there's a science of doing that and it's called cybernetics you know well and we also have a runaway ecological crisis the more we learn about it the more we see we see that you know like the capitalist market system is absolutely leading us all to death and the earth to death. And so it is human flourishing, but we also are concerned with the flourishing of life in general. Right. So I think that that is something that wasn't as much on the horizon in the 70s. You know, certainly think, you know, people were thinking about it, but breaking down this barrier between economics and ecology, I think, is a very cybernetic impulse and i think one that you know we need to keep working at because like you know whenever we think about these things as separate domains we're already

uh we're already uh engendering more destruction of the environment yeah yeah i think cybernetics can also help us in that kind of like um um, on a kind of, for left projects, like on an aggressive footing of like, if we recognize that like the capital and its kind of governance system is, it is cybernetic and like it has its own feedback circuits and like, say the, the, the explosive feedback circuit that we're on with, with ecology, right? Like how do you intervene in a system to halt and disrupt those circuits so as to the, so as to disintegrate the system is, um, is something like you can, you intervene in a system to halt and disrupt those circuits so as to disintegrate the system? It's something you can learn a lot from cybernetics to get lessons on how to intervene there.

The last thing I want to talk about is just what is a society that is non-capitalist and based off of cybernetic governance principles, what does that look like for just a person? Because I think, you know, this has been one of the big sort of like political challenges of the last, you know, 50 years. It's just the complete foreclosure of the ability to even just sort of imagine a system that's not this. Yeah, I think it means, in the first instance, it means a different orientation to your workplace and your community, right? when you grow up in a society where um power is exercised autocratically it has an infantilizing effect on on you as an individual yeah um and uh you know maybe your relationship to work is your workplace is one of sort of emotional detachment or of tantrum throwing. Right. Because these are these are reactions. These are natural reactions to being in an abusive environment.

You are in a system where the work of management is not only open to you, but expected of you. You have a different orientation to that workplace, to the community you're in, because it's your responsibility. responsibility. If you don't do it, you know, you're going to lose your autonomy. And also you're going to have real problems that you have to grapple with as an individual. So there is a responsibility that comes there. But also like that means an opening up of horizons in terms of, well, things don't always have to be the same. Things don't always have to be handed down to you for management on high. They can actually change. Like you can see the possibilities in front of you. You can plan for the future in your context, and you can have that meaningful freedom in your life

and be a full human being in that sense, right? And so I think that that's a very core everyday change that you could see. In terms of, you know, sort of your horizons of where you might work or what you might do, you know, you could expect that there would be more possibilities for each person to be like, quote unquote, entrepreneurial, right? To have initiative in their life and be able to envision and create things around them that, you know, they can't do right now because they either are stuck in a job that doesn't give them that freedom or it they are actually uh not even able to have a job right now

where they can have a reasonable expectation of survival um because their workplace is 100% oriented around just making sure the work gets done and, you know, the consequences be damned. So I think that, you know, that is another area that's important. And that sort of freedom of management extends all the way up to working in different kinds of capacities or jobs. Some people in kind of a middle ranking area in

a corporation these days might get shuffled around from department to department to try to kind of get a well-rounded understanding of what the corporation is and how it functions. But, you know, we can kind of expect that these roles would be more open to everybody because, again, you know, a system in the VSM is not a person. You know, a system in the VSM is not a person. A system is a function and that function should be fulfilled in a way that is as flexible as possible. So there's a lot less kind of, well, I'm stuck in accounting and that's my limits to specialization, all of that kind of stuff. Like, you know, it takes time to learn these things, but you could expect some more flexibility there without having that terror of, oh, yeah, you know, in the neoliberal era, everybody's expected to have like 15 jobs in the course of their quote unquote career.

but also each of those jobs is going to be interspersed with a period of absolute terror as they live with unemployed in a society without a safety net right um i i think that that's that's you know those are real consequences for everybody's uh life i think uh yeah yeah absolutely and i think like at a very very level, the way Beer puts it is that we are trapped in this kind of crazy system that its control variable is profit. That's the little variable that it's doing feedback on to maintain. Whereas what we're proposing

is the sort of cybernetic future would be a society that's optimizing flourishing like what beer beard the word he uses eudaimony which he's borrowing from aristotle just like flourishing um and i yeah a lot a lot of stuff flows out from that like imagine a world where like because we all feel right? That like everything around us is kind of like micro-tuned as a, like a little feedback loop to keep money and profit flowing and to keep capital accumulating. Just imagine a world where that's just not true anymore.

And the, the, the sort of social infrastructure that you grow up in is an infrastructure that instead optimizes for the flourishing of life. Yeah. And I think, you know, when we look at sort of the broader patterns of society today, we see all of these harebrained schemes that, you know, very rich men are embarking on and they're setting the agenda for society you know where that you know mark zuckerberg is telling us that the metaverse is the future and you just have to get on board with this even though anyone can see that this idea is patently ridiculous yeah um and in a

society where that kind of management that kind of money power doesn't exist anymore like you don't have to live under that kind of future horizon anymore where it's like eight men with absurd amounts of money cook up you know ridiculous schemes and everybody has to follow them just like they were following the orders of pharaoh back in the day. Yeah. I think do not be ruled by Pharaohs is as good a place as any to leave off unless you two have anything else you want to get to? There's one little line from Beer's book.

Well, it's actually a set of presentations called Designing Freedom that I absolutely love. It cracks me up every time I read it, so I'm just going to read it out for the listeners. It gives you a sense of his absolute ridiculous radicalism, like he's off the fucking charts with this stuff. At some point he says, and I'm quoting here,

every time we hear that a proposal will destroy society as we know it, we should have the courage to say thank God at last. Yes. That rules. A real maniac. Yeah. And he had this dictumum of if it works it's out of date

yeah so you know it's it's like like yeah don't be complacent you know um don't be a traditionalist i think also there's been there's been really horrific consequences of sort of the right being the ones to like take the urge for creative destruction or just like you know what was that line there's some what i forget some some venture capitalist thing is like move fast and break things and it's like yeah so when they move fast the things they break is us but yes you know we can move faster and break things that are bad yeah and it's to a creative and playful kind of um mode of being right that like you you might be able to work wake up in the morning and and think god you know it'd be really cool if we could have like um like a child care nursery just like like out in the out in the common area between these buildings and stuff

and like go to your go to your like local like your your workers council or whatever and have a really plausible like way of actually getting that and like collaborating with people to make that happen and then being like okay we'll we'll trial it as an experiment for 12 months we'll keep we'll see how it goes and then there's a feedback cycle where it's like okay some aspect of this design didn't really work out we'll we'll go talk about it some more and then iterate on that and that's that's uh like as it's an entrepreneurialism that doesn't bear much resemblance to what that word means right now it just means that human beings living real things real workers will be able to actually control their environments in this the substance of their lives and in a meaningful way yeah and like this

i think you know back in the 90s the early aughts sort of before the the 2008 crisis and in the the days of yore um it's there was a lot of talk about flexibility and dynamicism and adaptation. But what that always meant was we make decisions about what's going to change and you have to adapt. Right. It was it was it was, you know, always this arbitrary power from outside that would just be changing the social fabric and you had to be flexible enough to cope with what you were being subjected to it's very different if you know the planning is being done by you for you and you're moving towards adaptation and flexibility out of a sense of, oh, yeah, this would be better and I'm going to adapt to be in a better state to to work with my environment in a more healthy and a more flourishing way, as opposed to just like, oh, yeah,

you've got to work three jobs now so figure it out right that's a very different kind of flexibility a very different kind of adaptation and you know those things have sort of become dirty words in some ways but they are really core to the way that we all exist as organisms in the world and they don't have to be just synonyms for abuse. Exactly. Yeah. I think, okay, we can take this as a place to leave off.

Yeah. Do you two have stuff you want to walk? I know you have stuff you want to plug, but plug the things that you want people to listen to because they are. Yeah. Yeah. We're general intellect unit. You go to general intellect unit.

And it's got all the episodes on there. We're on Twitter as GIunitPod. Yeah, you can find us on all the podcast things. We're also part of a podcast network called Emancipation, so that's emancipation.network on the web. And yeah, some really excellent shows on there. We're collaborating with Swampside Chats and um Mortal Science uh From Alpha to Omega, Gypsy Utopia they're they're really wonderful shows that are all um it's a variety of different sort of uh takes on things but like um there's a sort of common there's a sort of spiritual common ground we all have um yeah we we're all interested in thinking systematically we're all interested in emancipation

as the network name says and we're all interested in sort of building something going forward trying to construct an alternative uh as opposed to simply uh getting caught up in day-to-day politics or getting caught up in uh doomer mentality yeah uh so yeah it's it's systematic it's critical but it's also constructive and i think that's what we're all trying to do there yeah yeah well thank you two both for coming on thank you it's been wonderful thanks for having us this has been NakedHappenHere you can find us at HappenHerePod in

the places there's also stuff at Kulzon Media that you can also find in those same places and possibly also different ones we have a website everyone asks me for my sources every single week and they get posted there once a month. So yeah, go to coolzonemedia.com

and you will find all of the sources so you don't have to DM me every week. All right, goodbye. Goodbye. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com sources thanks for listening you should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of riot.

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